<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Pantheon by Myzic</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29038326">Pantheon</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myzic/pseuds/Myzic'>Myzic</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Adventure Zone (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Character Study, Dead People, F/M, First multi-chap!, Fluff, Guilt, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Insomnia, Introspection, Not Beta Read, Survivor Guilt, Temporary Character Death, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, description of pain, now all i need is plot, prose</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 05:08:47</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>26,650</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29038326</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Myzic/pseuds/Myzic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The end of the world takes a lot from a person. Lup tries to figure out just how much, and how much more.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Barry Bluejeans/Lup, IPRE Crew | Starblaster Crew &amp; Lup, Lup &amp; Taako (The Adventure Zone)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Content Warnings for: Descriptions of pain, temporary character death, survivor's death, and description of dead bodies</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>It’s cold on Abraxas, cold enough that going into town is a feat best attempted while huddled in all the spare robes in their closets and at least three pairs of the thickest socks they own. It’s also perfect for making cold deserts like the salted caramel pudding Taako and her were currently whipping into perfection.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup slides open one of the cupboards, rummaging around for one of the preserved jars they’d bought last cycle at a farmer’s market with warm sun and a little boy in a straw hat, </span>
  <em>
    <span>to fit in</span>
  </em>
  <span>, he’d said, and then smiled with one of his front two teeth chipped crooked.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She wonders what happened to him. If he survived the writhing mass of fear and shadow that had spared his world nothing but its bared bones.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The caramel smells sweet like butterscotch and it doesn’t stick to the lid when she unscrews it with a sharp turn of her wrist. Well preserved.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you ever wonder,” Lup asks aloud, casually, the way you might address yourself in the mirror, “what happens to the people on the planets the Hunger doesn’t destroy?” She supposes it’s similar in a sense, though the person in her mirror does not know her nearly as well as her twin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Not really,” Taako replies, still staring at the metal bowl in his hand. “From the moment we arrive, we kinda fuck things up to the mo’ we leave. Don’t exactly leave those places in tip-top shape.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“True.” She lines up the cups on the counter and they gleam under the lights of the kitchen. Her reflection stares back at her, distorted and strange, warped to the point of being unrecognizable. For a moment there is nothing but the sound of cream being stirred forcefully, the occasional clang of the wooden spoon against the bowl. “But if you had to guess, I suppose, how many— like what percentile would you say survives the Hunger?”</span>
</p>
<p><em><span>Survives</span></em> <em><span>us</span></em><span>, Lup doesn’t say. They have never left a world they touched unbroken.</span></p>
<p>
  <span>He snorts unfavourably, ungraciously but she knows it is a forced indifference. “If I’m being nice, and I mean super-duper posi, I’d give us a passing grade.” The spoon clinks at the side of the glasses as he drops in big dollops of white cream cheese, rapping each of them on the table as he goes to convince the thick mixture to settle at the bottom. “And that’s it.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sometimes she wonders, late at night or in the reaches of dawn, because four hours of meditation always seems like a blessing until you realize there is no one but you and your thoughts to fill the time. But Lup wonders about their plane, the one she left behind, and she did a good job with that place, did what she needed, left to the stars— a saving grace she did not ask for— and thinks she didn’t intend to leave it as a ruin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But again, this is only in the morning, when she does not have Barry or Magnus or Davenport to bug and her thoughts are plaster, peeling from every surface to draw themselves over and into her skin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup, like the others during the crest of </span>
  <em>
    <span>times not to think</span>
  </em>
  <span>, and the ravenous tearing of </span>
  <em>
    <span>too much time</span>
  </em>
  <span>, has taken up pacing as a hobby.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She dips a finger into the caramel and pops it in her mouth, savouring the silky butterscotch, cloying and thick as it sinks past her tongue. “You know how I said the Library of Shared Arcanes and Focuses was the best thing about last cycle?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sure. It was pretty cool,” Taako entertains, leaning against the counter.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Change my mind.” She wiggles the little mason jar and holds it out to him. He hums, pleased as he mimics her. “We should’ve cleared the little guy out when we had the chance.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Note to self: Indulge in more of Lup’s charity cases next time she takes pity on a kid with a particularly wobbly lip.” Lup snorts and snatches it back from her brother, taking one of the partially filled pudding cups from the table and starting to fill it with the sugary substance. “Like,” he continues airily, “we didn’t pull that one ourselves every time we smelled weakness.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, well. We did it because we needed it.” The caramel fills in the gaps in the cup and Taako leans over to add another layer of cream. “And we’re space vigilantes now, bro. We can handle a little small-time business investment. Oh, what a drain on our limited resources, we were going to save that useless currency for the next cycle.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There is a child, a universe away, she hopes, with two pockets full of money that will not be quite enough to rebuild from the ground being scraped up like sand between burrowing fingers. Lup hopes that money will be worth something to him, and not just another thing to be buried along with too-small shoes and missing back teeth and every single soul they could not carry in their palms to salvation.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Whatever you say, Lulu.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The final layer of caramel goes on in layers, folding over itself again and again, smooth and hazel. It fills the rough and crumbling gaps of the pudding, spreads and filters into the clear spaces on the cup’s side until the murky, bumpy top of it smooths over and she can see herself reflected back, warped. That too smoothens, flattening until Lup can make out a perfect image of her visage in confectionary, no longer unrecognizable.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It is rounded, circular, and the top is utterly flat. She stares up from the mirror that has almost become disc-like and is relieved, or grateful, though there’s hardly a difference between the two, she recognizes herself in its dully scattered light.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Click.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her new device shudders out a small, square piece of paper, glossy and permanently capturing the human tower that was Magnus, straining to hold up Merle who’s standing on his shoulders, and Lucretia, sitting on his bicep, head crooked toward her notebook.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her friends, immortalized. Saved in a way, but telling Magnus that won’t stop him from treating himself like a meat shield.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You’re not really adding a whole bunch to the great tower of Magnus, Lucretia,” Merle squints down at her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She responds without looking up. “You’re not contributing much either. And I got here first.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They’re standing next to the brass statue of a bull, Magnus insisting they make a human duplex to take a picture next to, </span>
  <em>
    <span>with that new camera you’re always using now</span>
  </em>
  <span>. He’d already convinced Lucretia out of her quarters, but at the cost of one of his shoulders as she perches there. Lup can imagine her sitting the same way on a tall tree branch, slinking against its side, nose tucked firmly into her pages as she writes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey, guys?” He grunts out, not quite buckling, but trembling beneath their weight. “Ugh, goal achieved or whatever? Jenga tower complete?’</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup neglects to mention how Levitation would be a lot more effective than a Magnus building and makes sure not to crease the picture, placing it in the inner pocket flat against her chest, closest to the heart which is only by happenstance. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The thing is, Lup doesn’t write, doesn’t chronicle or obsess even if Taako might have something to say about that. It’s not her job, and that’s for a reason. Lucretia is good at what she does, capturing a thousand facts, documenting things that would have made the Institute commit ritual sacrifice if it meant they got to clamber into this plane and read them. She isn’t suited for that kind of thing anyway.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There are only so many different laws of physics you can scribble down before they all start to wash together in your head. So, she doesn’t do that.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her camera is less… just </span>
  <em>
    <span>less</span>
  </em>
  <span> in that way. It won’t tell you why the bull statue’s there in the first place, or why the villagers chose to make it out of a quickly degrading copper instead of something more practical like steel. All it has is Lucretia, grinning out of the corner of her mouth even as she looks away, Merle lifting his arms next to the statue, and Magnus, sweaty and flushed but excited because he always is about everything new. And nowadays, everything is always new.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The photos remember when she does not. An incomplete moment, but she is content to let them be exactly that. Lup doesn’t need to know why at that exact moment they were happy. She just likes to see that they were.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The corkboard next to her bed is filled with photos, a mural, a kaleidoscope of festival lights that burns her stomach with a spicy burst of alcohol foreign to her taste buds. Because they can’t save everyone, and sometimes all Lup manages to recover of a plane is a glossy photo she knows isn’t enough. Fingers trailing, leaving marks along the otherwise immaculate surfaces. One day, one day, they will be strong enough to save everyone and her board will be filled with things found instead of lost. A collection and not a tribute (a memorial.)</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This plane is too big for her to have its entirety.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Luce? Merle? I’m a big boy, I eat my protein and all that—” before he can finish, Magnus shivers, and then his legs crumple beneath him and Lup has her wand and camera whipped out before they can hit the floor.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Click.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Magnus stops in mid-air right before he hits the ground, having earned her pity if not her amusement, and two thumps plop before her, Merle tumbling down with a markedly louder thump than their chronicler, the two of them lying in heaps on the ground. Lup laughs, snorting and sticking her camera into her pocket before walking over to help them to their feet.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Really thought that one through, huh, my dudes?” She says between guffaws, Lucretia wiping the dust off her butt.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wait, you can cast Levitate?” Magnus doesn’t take her hand, and Lup grunts as she pulls Merle up instead. “Why in the hell didn’t we just do that?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Makes for some killer photos,” Lup explains, unrepentant. “Shoulda asked if you wanted me to waste spell slots on your stupid stunts.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Really</span>
  </em>
  <span>, she thinks as they realize Merle has a concussion and start arguing about who’ll heal the cleric. </span>
  <em>
    <span>What’s a place but it’s people</span>
  </em>
  <span>, </span>
  <em>
    <span>anyway</span>
  </em>
  <span>?</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Lup is standing, focusing at the front of the ship and casting, letting the flick of her wand exude heat and radiance which soars over the open, pitch-black ocean. The deck is empty save for her, and a chilly wind flows over the metal floor and through her bones. She wishes she would have thought to bring a jacket with her because no matter how Fireball makes the backs of her eyes burn or sears the hairs on her forearm, it isn’t actually a great technique for staying warm.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her Stone of Farspeech rattles at her hip, smacking the waistband of her pants as Davenport’s sharp voice comes through. “Now, Lup.” She casts, extending her fingers and the dark parts like swaths of fabric before her flame. There’s scuffling on the deck behind her, the sound of footsteps fading in as the fireball whooshes forward, illuminating their way.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Then, there’s a shoulder against hers, and the side of Lucretia’s face is briefly illuminated by a warm amber that lies across her cheekbones and makes her eyes flash and hair glow in the light.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Brought you something.” Lup takes the offered metal canister and almost moans as the taste of coffee slides into her stomach like a hot rock. “Thought you might need the energy.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“‘Cretia you are a lifesaver, I could kiss you.” She thanks profusely and takes a sip, unminding of the sting and numbness prickling hand in hand as it burns her tongue. “This has got to be worth another spell slot or two.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, sure,” Lucretia starts, “though I imagine a nice, long rest could do you one better than that.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She only hums in response, glad to have her hands wrapped around the thick cylinder instead of sore on the hilt of her wand. “Can’t,” Lup says after a second.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Lup, please, the pyromaniacs can wait until morning. It’s freezing out here and your Fireball is as technically perfect as it’ll ever be. You don’t need to practice it more, I’m pretty sure you can cast it better than anyone we’ve met in the last four cycles.” It’s too dark to see her face, her expression. Then, the rock at her side shakes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Lup—” the Captain’s voice filters through.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, yeah, I’m on it,” She mutters, grabbing her wand from her boot, and without looking, casts Fireball again. It blazes, but she keeps her eyes open this time, watching Lucretia’s face as she stares, concerned and tired at her. Her hair ruffles, silver and amber and gold glinting. The bags under her eyes are deep and Lup wonders if they are all hypocrites because she wants to tuck her into bed with a hot cup of soup and pen laid firmly down on her bedside table.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lucretia blinks, holding her eyes closed just long enough that Lup’s spell is a firefly in her pupil when she opens them again. “What’re you doing out here?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A sigh. “The water’s a no-magic zone.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What?” The incredulity and tinge of panic in her voice makes her sound wide awake. “What do you mean the water’s a no-magic zone, that’s—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Im-poss-ible,” She drags out the word. “Yeah. It is, but so am I and so are you, and we still need to get where we’re going.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Within moments her breath is fogging again, any dredge of warmth finally dissipating into the sky and she shivers. And then feels mad about shivering because fuck, she’s an Evocation wizard and that should mean at least some protection against the cold, but Lup needs all the spell slots she can muster right now, so she tucks her fingers under her arms and squeezes her eyes tight.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There’s nothing but the determined lapping of waves, slapping the hull of the Starblaster which for all intents and purposes is a normal ship without its bond engine and running on an emergency operating mechanism. Something rustles next to her, sliding and pulling before a layer of fabric is draped over her, still toasty with leftover body heat that soaks into Lup’s shoulders. She can’t help but slump into it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Does Barry know Fireball?” Lucretia asks. “How about Merle? And don’t we have any navigation systems that can help us see without exhausting you?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Everything complicated is magic.” She laughs, mostly to herself because Lucretia doesn’t seem that entertained. “I bet the IPRE folks were pretty proud of themselves for that one. Taako knows Fireball, but he’s on the mainland with Magnus and Merle does plants, Lucretia. Fire is pretty much the antithesis of that one.” Lup shuffles closer, linking arms with Lucretia now that she’s no longer wearing her robe. “I could do with the company, though.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh, cool. I’ll go get Barry then.” Lucretia says.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup pulls her closer to her own side, turning her arm into a metal chain, securing the chronicler to her side. “Nuh-uh, I need a sacrifice for the sea, and it prefers pretty, book-oriented chicks.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Like I said,” She responds, and Lup is sure she’s doing that smug little corner-of-your-mouth smile that’s her equivalent of a shit-eating grin, “I’ll go get Barry.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She just locks her arm in, shoves it into her pocket, and Lucretia, despite her words, doesn’t yank away. Lup can feel her body trembling, clinging to her side and she basks in their warmth. Waves still crash at the side of the ship like they can’t tell it’s not a cliff they can corrode and tear down with time, but the night becomes a lot more bearable with the simple gift of Lucretia’s presence, reliable and steady as always.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hello? Lup, can I get another—” The Stone of Farspeech knocks itself against her, and Lup grabs it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey, Capp’n’port, this is Flaming Hot Chicken Wing reporting in, and I’ve got some good news about your duties as an alarm clock this very fine evening,” She huffs into the stone. “I just got access to a perfect internal clock, so I will be able to perform and time my own beep test from here on out, thank you.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hi, Captain,” Lucretia says and Lup shushes her. She wasn’t supposed to worry the other crewmates about why they decided to take the scenic route on this particular voyage. “Nice night we’re having.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The ship suddenly rocks as Davenport steers it along a towering mass of rock, craggy and hulking as it skims by them, nearly skinning the Starblaster’s metal exterior. Lup watches it pass with wide eyes. She hadn’t seen a single inch of its enormous form approaching.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hi, Lucretia. You two do what you need to do to make sure we survive the second coming of Ms. North Atlanta.” There’s an expectant pause, and she can feel Lucretia staring at her. “Like… like the iceberg the Titanic hit?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They both make appropriately amused noises of realization out of respect, and only a hint of pity. Her rock sighs. “Yeah. Yeah, sounds good you two. Davenport out.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup casts Fireball with her last third level spell slot, watching it fade into the night.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I… have a question for you.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Uh, sure,” Lup returns distractedly, trying to hold onto what little flickers of heat still ghost her lips and the line of her hair. “Shoot, babe.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Great. Thanks, it’s just for my journals, detailing every part of our journey. Even us.” The words are soft like she thinks she’ll be rebutted for </span>
  <em>
    <span>doing her job</span>
  </em>
  <span>, writing stuff about them. Unsure, even though they’ve been locked in a partial embrace for the past ten minutes, even though they have spent the last thirty-four (thirty-three? thirty-five?) years like family through the worst days of Lup’s life. Like she doesn’t already know that none of the clothes in Lucretia’s wardrobe are from their home, that she has shed every physical reminder like it will free her from the burden of its memory. Like she hasn’t seen her snort and giggle through intoxicated confessions that this is her first time getting drunk.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup wraps both arms around her, using the cold as an excuse to leech precious heat and hug her friend. “I’ll do my best, though I’d bet you have a better memory for our trip than little ol’ me does.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“When did we start calling our years ‘cycles?’” She freezes, then thinks about it for a second, searching her memory, her memory which has the capacity for over ten times the length of their mission so far. Lup comes up short.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>No. No, she should be able to remember. They were probably assigned that term for logs or something when they set off… but no. This was supposed to be a two-month expedition, not decades. Maybe in their tenth year? Their fifteenth? But that was already half the Starblaster’s journey ago, and when every year starts and ends the same, the middle bits start to feel like filler, just a bunch of cotton air building up to the big climax, the ever-present apocalypse nipping at their heels.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lucretia is trembling, and Lup is trembling and she wonders if that’s what her question actually is. When did their years turn interchangeable? Because journals and written records and memories were all subjective and so they too could be wrong, as fallible as the beings they came from.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“‘Cycles,’ I—” She says, then starts and stops again. “When did we…”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Because a cycle is a loop. A circle, starting and meeting at the same point.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Something shifts, wrenches in her gut, and she can feel herself blur, not just physically but through boundaries and bubbles and the stars were so bright, Lup could feel them tearing her, a rip, a smudge smeared slightly to the side of never should have been at all. She is everything the light can reach within her and spread itself into, permeating her existence until that too is an infinite expanse of nothing between real and</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Her. Herself. Lup and utterly Lup standing dazed, then grinning beside her brother the way she always is</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Does</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The thing about circles is that you can’t see where they start or where they end. You can only ever see the way they flow into themselves, a singular track, folding over, and into an eternal </span>
  <em>
    <span>cycle</span>
  </em>
  <span>. No matter what happens, even if they clutch tightly to the thin shell of each plane they land on, the end result is the same in that they remain untouched. They are… above it, not because they should be or because they want to be, but because whatever force of the universe lets them carry on means that they are no longer beholden to the laws that decay the ground ashen charcoal and crumbling beneath their feet.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>When you know you’ll get another chance, how do you stop the worlds from all looking the same because next year, you know, they might as well be?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She hesitates, and tries, really tries to give Lucretia the answer she says she wants. “I don’t remember,” Lup admits like defeat, and defeat has always burned her the way her own fire has never managed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At some point, a small part of their subconscious had wormed its way into their language, and in it, they had already given up, created a self-fulfilling prophecy that whispers things would never change, never get better because it all was one. big. cycle. Lup wonders at what point they’d betrayed themselves with it, whether it was in year fifteen something had settled in their chests like complacency, or maybe even fatigue.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Despair isn’t something Lup usually lets herself feel, and on a more righteous night, that would still be the case. But tonight is cold, barren, and there is no blaze for her to feed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah.” Lucretia exhales, resigned as though she already expected the answer. “Me either.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Dying isn’t scary. What dying is, is easy. She’s seen it before. Magnus enveloped by a sea of smoke. A flash of her brother’s hair before the earth gives way beneath him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They are closer to death, maybe, than anyone has ever been before them. A hair’s breadth away, and you would have thought Lup knew how easy it is to die because traveling is good for the soul, but bandits are not the most merciful. As it turns out, dying is much easier than anyone gives it credit for. Magnus dies, throwing himself away half-cocked every other year and she wonders how deep it has ingrained itself in him, if it will always be habit because of that first, crucial time.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Sometimes it is slow, and those are the worst. Lup prefers the quick, if violent ones, because wasting away for an illness their immune system has no hope of withstanding is like slow torture, but it could be worse. Pain means she’s alive.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Because being dead is nothing. Not ‘nothing like she thought it would be.’ Just— nothing. Non-existence, and Lup doesn’t know if she expected it to be like that other in-between, that rocket through the barriers of reality, but it isn’t. Lup thinks, maybe they’re kept in a sort of stasis, spirits perfectly preserved to be vaulted back into their bodies the moment the Starblaster breaks through the atmosphere and every painstaking inch is recreated. Maybe it isn’t a true death. The thought is almost naïve, because why would they be special again, special as to desecrate, to defy the laws that bind every mortal soul </span>
  <em>
    <span>twice</span>
  </em>
  <span>-over.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup hopes she’s right nonetheless because though she’s died less than a handful of times, it terrifies her. She’s floating, or not floating, but there is no sound, no touch, no taste, no temperature, and she can’t feel her own body, and in this way she is passive. A bystander, unable to do anything, unable to even blink, because she does not have eyes, she can barely think, and every thought that passes through her head is a soft concept. They’re never there for long, and it is less than a single second, but the thought of being stuck like that forever terrifies her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Dying isn’t scary, not compared to that. Being dead is what scares her because inaction grates like so many pieces of her being torn to shreds. Lup has never stood still in her life, and inaction is not how she graduated with Taako top of their class, a wand she bled for held gingerly between her fingers.</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Glycos is a gorgeous town of icen spires, buildings smoother than any ice carver could hope to make because it isn’t crafted. It is grown, sung taller and higher and more beautiful than any place she’s ever been, with light refracting through the buildings and sunsets turning the village a wash of soft rainbow hues. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s one of their Nights of Birthed Crystal. Voices, pitched haunting and shallow, bounce off every surface and reverberate through glass halls.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Merle, can’t you just— feel him or something? Use your holy demonic detector,” Lup hisses because she’s pretty sure they’re in the same building now, but they still can’t find the demon they’d been hired to kill.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t do anything with demons, I’m a plant guy,” he rebuts. “Don’t you have a spell? Use one of those from that big-ass bible thing wizards get.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s not how—” the roof above them shivers and her voice is drowned out by the structure above their heads scraping against itself, like claws running themselves sharp. She glances at Merle. “Let’s go.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They sprint down the length of the hall as fast as they can without sliding on the ice, shimmering, her reflection gleaming desperate as herself. She looks wild-eyed but then, she feels desperate. Lup lets it stay because this is a cold town and anything that turns her fingers quick and feet quicker is something she can use. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The building swirls, twirls within itself, around spiral staircases that reach tall as the heavens and Lup is singing, her reflection shadowing a split-second slower and echoing with a thousand voices, none of them her own. The demon is at the top of the tower. He sees them coming and the stairs turn slick and deadly beneath her feet.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her center of balance is swept away with it, and she teeters forward toward the chilled ground, arms flying out in front of her like they will have any hold on its smooth bearing. Instead, Lup forces every instinct in her body aside and rockets Merle forward those crucial last few feet with Gust of Wind because he has the necessary seed components on him, of course he does.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And she falls, the slide whipping her off the side of the building, air rushing in past her arms, freezing every limb solid and Lup screams but her voice is not her own. The wind tears the words away and she thinks of feathers and falling, only remembering that Feather Fall takes a minute halfway down, and then she does not get the chance to consider Levitate. Words like hymn and prayer and lullabies sing her away and it doesn’t hurt when she hits the ground because head-first is the quickest, she thinks, so that’s what she does.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup doesn’t regret her death that cycle, just the fact that she left Merle to face a demon without any firepower to do it. Her last thought is hoping he gets the Light without her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Being dead is becoming a shade, a pale imitation of herself and she comes back, heart thudding and breathing hard, jumping just as quick as her brother into an embrace.</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Davenport, Captain Davenport, my suit’s got a tear in it, so there’ll be no rendez-vousing at homebase for yours truly. I’ve left our mission supplies in the,” her voice fades in and out of her conscious mind, slipping through her fingers like soap, water, she needs water, “in the— the westward cottage three miles from that big…” Lup mutters the words with a sigh, heat making her brain drowsy. “</span>
  <em>
    <span>Fuck-off hole</span>
  </em>
  <span>.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She dies, mind still sleeping, and wakes up dazed, shivering. This time the abyss slips by her, more of a sedative than anything.</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lucretia screams at them, too far away, too afraid for the high tear of her voice that cracks under her final cry. “They’re beaming it everywhere, get back to the ship! Get out of the way, please, you have to leave!” White light envelops her, too bright for Lup to keep her eyes open and she stumbles, feet hitting the floor, but it is blinding even with the thin lid of her eyes and she stumbles.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup finds out what it feels like to be unmade, and it is agony. Everyone who dies in the flood of being ripped apart atom from atom from the Light of Creation’s perverted magnification twitches at odd moments for the next month, Lucretia dropping her pen at odd intervals, Taako spilling salt until he decides to hug all the ingredients to his chest, Magnus taking more hits in spars than any other year. They feel what it’s like when the Light of Creation is in the wrong hands, and flinch every single time at the memory.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Being dead is almost a relief after that kind of unbecoming.</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A pillar of pure black strikes the ground, burrowing under the earth, and Lup stands before it, wand ready because it has chosen the wrong planet, the wrong people to ravage and ruin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There’s a dome-shaped observatory behind her full of survivors, high on a mountain because that’s where people go. To the highest point they know of, like if they can just stand tall enough they can escape to the stars. Looking to the stars has always been an act of hope, but she has only ever known a handful of people who managed to escape by twisting galaxies and nebulae. Lup still doesn’t know if they have been saved.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Shadows spurt and burble out of the side of the pillar in so many abominations, a mimicry of the lives they stole heaving forward in masses of polluted smog and neon veins. Her wand flashes out from her body in an arc, and she casts Storm Sphere because the Hunger thinks it can warp this planet, bend the very ground to its will.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup fights it with the sky, because she is of fire and this planet is not her home but it wants to live, to survive, and the Hunger has no place on its surface, no claim to the ground that bears the sky that shelters its people. So, she takes what she has, which is her wand in her hand the way it always is, the earth, a blaze, her hair whipping around her face like so many blades of wind lashing out. She storms, and</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She dies, defiant.</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There is trembling around her, shaking and a rushing, cataclysmic, the walls of this planet's core are shuddering. Lup can’t hear herself breath because Polpagos is dying around her and the sound of its last gasping breaths are cacophonous. The Light of Creation has been ripped from its heart, and she’s glad Davenport is too practical to stay behind and die with it in his hands when she has been dead from the moment the walls behind her collapsed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She casts and doesn’t remember any spells that might power a world, but Lup throws herself forward and she grasps at every fast-dying wink of magic and arcana within herself because she can’t power a whole planet that has used the Light of Creation as a crutch for too long, but she can </span>
  <em>
    <span>try</span>
  </em>
  <span>. That’s what she does best.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Every spell slot she still has left is thrown at the heart in offering, and Lup burns out. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Being dead is… mundane. It’s commonplace.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Because dying isn’t scary to Lup. She has come close to death too many times for that, been hurt far worse than what it takes for her body to decide ‘lights out.’ As it turns out, dying is easy— but so is being dead.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Eventually, Lup stops being afraid of both.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Lup!” Magnus comes bounding down the halls of the Starblaster, all clumsy feet and eager voice. “Hey! Hey. Elves have long memories, right?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sure,” She agrees easily. “No, I did not meet the founder of the Institute for Planar Research and Exploration, I’m only a little over a hundred.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What? No. I was wondering, d’you remember that one planet? With the floating cities, where the surface was, like, covered in water and stuff?” He asks, rummaging through his pockets, and pulling out a sheaf of paper. “There was that guy who helped us with the ship’s sonar systems so we could find the Light—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And it did jackshit to help next cycle?” Lup finishes for him. “Yeah.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He unfolds the blueprint, holding it out to her. “I thought we still might be able to use it. Found this in one of my jacket pockets.” It’s the device's schematics, with a wide, domelike light at its forefront, a mesh speaker at the top. “You don’t remember his name, do you? ‘Cause I was just thinking about it and uh, felt kind of bad. We… didn’t manage to save that place.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” Lup responds. “We didn’t.” She thinks hard for a moment, trying to remember the kind mechanic with curly brown hair, who specialized in aquatic radar equipment for surface-lost items of Dymetria.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She can remember the kind of sandwiches he made every day for lunch— tuna— because they smelled so strongly the scent worked itself into her clothes. Lup breathes and remembers the tang of fish, but not his name. Not his name. They spent so long charting and mapping, recording details like they’d be closed-book tested at the end of the year that they hadn’t paid much attention to the inhabitants, not unless they had a relevant skillset to offer. Hell, this guy </span>
  <em>
    <span>had</span>
  </em>
  <span>, and she still doesn’t know, and aren’t elves supposed to have longer memories than this?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Only a little over a century into her life, and she can’t be bothered to remember someone who has no one else to remember him. Not anymore.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know, Magnus,” She admits, and it is either rage, as it so often is at remembering the kind of devastation the Hunger has wreaked, or it is shame, curled hot and stinging as a herbal poultice. “It was too long ago.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Are you sure?” Magnus asks, and he sticks his hands into his robe, leans forward as if subconsciously, eyes grasping. This is how he feels guilt. A desperate need to make it better, to make it right, but she can’t help him with that. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Ask Lucretia,” Lup offers instead. “Good thing we brought a chronicler, right? Probs the most valuable member for decade-long road trips like ours.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>His face loosens a bit and she hadn’t realized how tight it was screwed up a second before. “Awesome, thanks!” Magnus backs down the hallway, and one thing she knows about her family is how guilt slopes the shoulder of every one of them. It is not a thing she ever wanted to learn. “Just thought he deserves to be remembered, right? And I guess we’re the only ones who can do that now,” He reads her mind with a casual airiness, and then he’s gone around the corner of the hallway, off to craft a memorial of a man none but they recall.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>There are a lot of people on this world. Market places chock full of bustling bodies, brushing up against each other, against her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup keeps an eye on the stalls, though it feels strange to be around so many when there have been years of just them on the Starblaster. Just the crew. She weaves through the crowd, stopping at a stall full of spices and vegetables, gingerly holding up a string of garlic like she’ll be able to sniff the estrogen in them. She shrugs and pays, holding copper circlets out to a stall owner whose face she doesn’t bother to register. They probably won’t meet again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There are a lot of people on this world.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup doesn’t see any of them. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Something aches and pulses in the back of her mind, a light drumbeat thumping like the footsteps of a crowd that twitches as a moving being. A parasite, unwelcome, unwanted, throbs, chanting and crooning because the crowd is murmuring, people speaking to each other, laughing, but all they are saying is </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>, </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>, </span>
  <em>
    <span>dead</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She is walking in a city full of people and they are all corpses that don’t yet know it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And Lup knows herself well enough to recognize that it’s going to be one of those days. If she’s lucky, a day. Not a week or a month where she looks a living, breathing thing in the eye and can only see the way it is already stiffened with rigor mortis, though they have never stayed long enough to watch with their own eyes. She keeps her eyes to the horizon, an invisible middle distance that keeps her enveloped on the way back home.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Barry’s in his room, and she dumps the garlic on the table, unminding of whatever experiment he’s doing now, and slumps over his shoulder. “Hey, sweetie. Whatcha up to?” She asks into his shoulder.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He humms and sets down his pliers, winding weighted, comfy arms around her neck. “The cats on this planet have bioluminescent fur and I’m trying to find out if it’s because some wizard fucked up a while back in their evolu—” Barry stops mid-sentence, and she opens her eyes as he lets go of her. “Are you okay?” She plants herself in his lap and he goes back to hugging her, which is nice.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yep. Keep talking, nerdboy. I wanna hear more about,” Lup thinks back, “weird-ass felines. Stingers, right?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Glowing fur. And, uh,” His concerned pause is kept to a minimum, and Lup appreciates that too, “sure. I’m thinking someone decided to have fun with a particularly important feline ancestor. That, or they developed it as a scare-tactic against predators. Like how moths impersonate owls with the eyes on their wings, or how certain types of frogs adapted to have brighter skins to emulate the poisonous breeds of their species.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She wraps her arms tighter around him, soaking in Barry. “Mmm. Cool.” Something occurs to her, and her eyes flit open as she stares at him, raising her hands slowly so he sees them coming. “Wait, I just gotta… check something.” He has a mole, a big one right on the cartilage of his left ear. Her hand brushes over it and she kisses his hairline. He still has his face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Goh what you were looking phor?” Barry says, warbly from two squished cheeks, and Lup lets go of him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Gotta make sure this squishy face knows I still love it,” She responds, deflecting.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Aww, babe…” Barry holds up the string of garlic. “Should I bring these to your room for Taako now or later? ‘Cause he’s the one that knows Fabricate for your pills. Not me.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I—” Lup settles in against Barry’s chest and then uses Teleport to move him from beneath her and onto his bed three feet away, and Misty Step to land back on his lap. It’s fine, she’s not doing anything else today. “Okay, I had a bad time in town. Brain’s not up for being functional today, I guess. Next time I go, do you want to tag along?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah, of course. Do you want to do something…?” They sit with each other for a few more moments, comfy on top of his bed, content to lay down, and Barry doesn’t ask her about why she’s sticking to him like a fearful slug.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I want to spend some time with my favourite heretic against natural laws of the universe,” She responds.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sounds like a good time to me.” Barry rolls and she plops to the side of the mattress, back against the wall and looking at his gorgeous face in each other’s arms. They stay that way for a few minutes, with nothing but the sound of soft breathing and the fall of his chest against her own, seeping life and warmth into the air again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup could stay here forever.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wanna go get some canned tuna and tempt the local strays into fur samples and pets?” Fuck sitting still.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>Hell</span>
  </em>
  <span> yes.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Next time, she makes sure to go with a crewmate at her side. Magnus, Taako, Davenport, and their faces, the faces of her family peel away the frame of her world’s canvas and they are alive, and she is alive, and then, everyone else is too.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you think we’ve changed?” Lup asks instead of saying, </span>
  <em>
    <span>the mirror doesn’t know my face anymore</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Davenport sees through her, glancing up with piercing eyes that just as quickly take her apart as they do their route through the Ingka Canyons. She feels like she did way back, bold as she can make herself, gleaming as a fortress of steel and impenetrable as they are judged along a line of applicants for the first inter-planar expedition, for the next tolerant couple in the orphanage, waiting for a relative to step up, even if family is something Lup has learned isn’t worth a damn save her twin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“With the kind of things we’ve seen, I think it’d be more messed up if we were exactly the same, Lup.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She presses further, and maybe it’s a move that leaves her vulnerable, that leaves her insides bared when they aren’t as sharp as she’d like. “I don’t feel the same, I can’t explain it, but I’m not the same me that first boarded this ship.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her memories are still her own, but Lup knows at some point she cared about certain things, disliked velvet and distrusted others. She remembers shattering a glass figurine shot through with gold and grey, reaching toward the sky in an uncle’s house just because it was beautiful. Emotion without motive, rage without an outlet. Lup clings to what she has left, which is her brother as the strongest reminder, but nothing is constant, especially not a person, forever in flux.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Unfairness, she gets. Lup grabs hold of the life she had. Greg Grimaldis owes her money, and that is an easy thing to get upset about because it is simple and straightforward.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m sorry this bothers you so much,” Davenport answers, “and I’m sorry I don’t have much of an answer for you. It doesn’t bother me because this is my life now, and change is a part of life, even if it’s something so big as—” he laughs and it simply exists, not out of amusement, but to fill open air. “The end of the world.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Huh. So, you’re okay letting it all go. Just like that?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He grins wryly. “To be honest, I don’t really remember what it was like before all this. So, I guess I’m not really qualified to answer in the first place. I think you’ve changed though, Lup, if that’s what you’re really after.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Have I?” She asks, discomfort shed for the moment that Davenport sees through her so clearly. “How do you know?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Would the Lup that boarded this ship so much as paused to consider who she was becoming?” He says like it’s an explanation. Lup thinks for a moment and decides that it is.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Music is different from other skills in her arsenal in that it is inherently selfish. It’s not… a spell or a weapon, something to utilise, to turn deadly on the sky. It is selfish because it is hers and it has been a very long time since Lup has done anything solely for herself.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>By that definition, being with Barry is selfish too.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup writes another note, scribbling them down as Barry plays a short statement, humming under her breath, trying to hold onto that wink of delight that fluttered in her chest at the melodic rhythm. “Gee, Bee, Gee, Eff, Ee, Dee, Ee,” She hums the letters softly to herself, keeping them in her head as she does. “Ay, Ay, Ay.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Dum da da da dum da dum da da da,” Barry sings loudly beside her on the piano bench, and she circles a spot on her sheet in the wrong place. He morphs it into a bastardization of ‘Piano Man,’ picking up pace, and she whaps the keyboard, pressing down discordant notes that twang harshly together.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Babe. Babe. Babebabebabe,” Lup announces, standing up from the bench to grab an eraser from her toothpick music stand. “Shut up. I’m never going to get this done in time for the performance, and then,” She holds out her arms sweepingly, “everyone’s going to die. So keep it on the down-low, kay?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Nah, Lucretia’s got this in the bag. I saw her painting myself the other day and it was like looking in a mirror. Freaky stuff.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She skids an eraser over the page in a single swipe. “S’not gonna hurt our chances if there are three people rocking the stage, and I don’t know if Merle’s gonna make that cut.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Lup, if I’m being honest,” Barry closes his eyes, presses fingers to the keyboard, and plays an arpeggio, “this is the most fun I’ve had in ages. I really don’t think we need to be sweating this one so much.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She picks up her violin, puts her index finger on the ‘A’ string, and her middle on the ‘E,’ striking at the strings with her bow, and the chord hangs in the air, victorious. “Don’t you?” Lup asks.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I— what’s so wrong with taking our time when we have it?” He pulls the piano cover down over the keys, and it thunks against the sheen of laminated black wood.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“This world is counting on us,” Lup reminds him.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“There is always a world counting on us, but we are fallible,” Barry responds, “and we need rest. Rest, like a year’s time to do something fun for once.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How is that fair?” Lup asks, and there’s the crux of it. “Why do we get to play and have fun when there is a chance that by this time next year everyone on this planet will be dead and buried? The world is ending, Barry, and they just don’t know it yet. What have we done to deserve happiness when the cost of it is such total destruction?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That is what it always comes down to. People die, and they escape unscathed, untouched, free to carry on, to laugh, but why do they get to— why does Lup get to grin at Magnus coughing up extra jalapeno in his guacamole, to stand in a town where ice sings. Why does she get to fall in love when everyone whose lives they have touched have been made worse by the time they leave.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What did I do to deserve you?” Her voice is raised and she didn’t mean for it to be, but it quietens at the end until it is a plea. She would have preferred it came out loud, angry and righteous. “Why do I get to have you? Why do </span>
  <em>
    <span>we</span>
  </em>
  <span> get to have us?” Instead, it is small and lost.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I—I don’t know,” Barry is quiet with his words, unsure. “I don’t think that’s how it works, at least not for us.” She puts her bow down on the piano bench and sits.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What gives us the right to be happy?” She asks and knows he doesn’t have the answers to her questions, but she asks them anyway because they need to be said. Lup needs to have these words exist somewhere other than in the twirling colossus of her mind bearing down with all the weight of Atlas’ sky, even if the air between her parted lips is not enough to lessen its burden.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s not how this works. We can’t just live our lives asking what’s the price of the things we love,” he returns. “But, if I had to think about it that way, then… Lup, I think we’ve already paid the cost. It’s not easy, and I know you never said it was, but the years have not been kind to us. They’ve been harsh and miserable in equal measure, but I don’t think that should stop us from finding happiness, from finding joy where we can get it.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Loving Barry is selfish. It is selfish because they are the only survivors of their world and the only survivors of tens of others, and that means it’s their job to be receptacles, to carry each piece of those dead planets with them and use it to defeat the Hunger, to strike and strike and strike at it until it will never wrench bones, tear keystones and people up again. So, it’s selfish to love Barry, because Lup doesn’t love him for any of those reasons, but she can’t help it either.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>One more thing about loving Barry: it is easy. It’s so easy to love him, and maybe it wouldn’t be if they had less time, if he didn’t do that soft exhale, mouth agape and eyes searching, delighted, each time the Starblaster lands somewhere new. The world is ending, and from that inescapable, desolate wreckage of endless rubble— Lup derives joy.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“When I say that’s not how it works, I mean, there is no cosmic scale out there, weighing our suffering and deciding what we get to have,” Barry tells her, cleanly, with the precise words of someone who has had this conversation with themselves before. “If anything— well, instead of cost and consequence, I would compare it to— to—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Long way to tell me you don’t believe in karma.” Lup interrupts and he shoots her a glance amused and exasperated in equal measure.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He takes her hand, and it is warm, calloused. She wonders if he remembers getting the thick scar between his pinky and ring finger Lup can feel when she grasps it back.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Lup, you’re my silver lining,” Barry confesses. “Bad stuff happens, and I love you, and I don’t think, ‘this is my punishment.’ I think, ‘wow, I’m lucky.’ Because there is the bad and there is you. And you are anything but bad.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She laughs at that because it’s so cheesy and sweet and </span>
  <em>
    <span>Barry</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Tears prickle at the corners of her eyes and Lup blinks them away before pulling him into a kiss, violin strings digging into the soft skin under her arm.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Silver lining,” Lup murmurs, holding him still. “I like the sound of that.” So, maybe learning how to play the violin is selfish, and so is loving Barry.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It is a selfishness she decides to let herself have. They are still mortal, in the end, and luckily enough, that means they receive the privilege of letting themselves be happy.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They play together beautifully, harmoniously, and with the ease of two who have had a lot of time to practice. Her fingers tremble when she performs, and Lup fashions it into vibrato to ring in the audience, shifting up the neck of her violin, Barry placing fingers down on the piano like he’s caressing a lover if not for how he always seems to touch her twice as softly. Notes float through the air, and her heart is in her throat, but Barry is there, and that is not something she could have said for herself decades ago. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Joy</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Lup plays, an act of relief ringing out for the world to hear, her fingers dancing over the violin and soft to her family. She tells herself hope is still worth reaching for, that love and happiness are not things that must be exercised from her life because misery gathers in the pulsing arteries of her still-beating heart like a bladed curse. Grief, it seems, has turned from a weapon in her hands to shackles around her wrists, but she does not have to leave them that way. Joy is not a crime to be guilty of.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>So, Lup releases the bow, the tip extending, she holds Barry’s hand, fingers intertwined and she lets herself be something other than a survivor. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Joy</span>
  </em>
  <span>, she thinks and doesn’t let go.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>“All of them?” Lup asks, wand still in her holster because they were depending on Merle’s plants and she doesn’t want to make a mistake here. “You know there’s no coming back from the kind of destruction I specialize in.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Merle waves a hand at the contents of his greenhouse grumpily. “Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. The whole batch is ruined anyway.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She shrugs and lights one of the plants near her, watching the tips of it curl and shrivel with the flame, shrinking in on itself as a low wisp of smoke starts to waft to the roof. The plant next to that one catches fire, and Merle and her shut the door behind them as they stand outside, waiting. The greenhouse glass radiates heat against her back and Lup turns to the cleric.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“So, what was wrong with the little buggers?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He crosses his arms, feet set apart. “A poisonous strain of weed infected all the kiddies. Doesn’t exactly make for good medicine,” Merle grumbles.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Ah.” The crackle of fire behind them pops and wavers, even with the barrier of the greenhouse walls and it’s bubble protecting them. “It must be a bitch and a half for you to re-categorize all the new species we find, huh.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“What? Re-categorize? No, that kinda thing grew back home,” he argues. “I just recognized it.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup feels something stirring at the bottom of her stomach, like giddy laughter, or hysterics. “You… didn’t check to make sure it’s the same plant?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Why would I?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She pinches her nose and tries not to think too hard about the perfectly good medicinal herbs burning to a crisp behind them. “Barry and I have spent a lot of cycles studying different species, and they are almost always, always, different from what we knew.” Merle squints at her and Lup throws out her hands. “This place evolved different, Merle! The whole point is that it’s not. home.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, how was I supposed to know that!” He complains.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“</span>
  <em>
    <span>We’re on cycle</span>
  </em>
  <span>— okay. Okay, did you test the plants to see if they were poisonous in the first place?” She questions.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yes?” Merle says. “No? No.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup takes a breath. “And do you know why we don’t disembark the Starblaster for three hours after landing?” She doesn’t give much of a pause for him to not know the answer. “It’s to check if the air is safe for breathing outside the ship’s bubble. We were sent on a scientific research miss—” Lup cuts herself off before she can finish because getting frustrated at Merle for not practicing proper standards for hypotheses is reaching into alarmingly nerdish territory.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It would be easier if they weren’t depending on his medicine to immunize them from the Light’s awful, mutated, air-borne disease currently ravaging the planet.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“So… you’re saying the weeds might not have poisoned my tomatoes?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You should have checked, my dude.” Gestures to the greenhouse. “Can’t be sure now, ‘cause you assumed it was causation instead of correlation.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Okay, what I’m hearing is that the bad gardening wasn’t my fault?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup laughs, shaking her head. “Oh no, burning down all the medicine is definitely definitely your fault. The weeds, though? Those were pure coincidence, probably.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Like when I made all those beautiful, hand-made gifts for you guys,” Merle deliberates, face lit up from his sun wreathed glass house. “You didn’t like them because— because—” His brow furrows. “Nah, I still don’t get it. I guess you could say sometimes shit happens and it ain’t got nothing to do with us?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Um, sure, sometimes we mistake repeated correlation for causation.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Like how it’s not our fault that Hunger has existed for way longer than us, and is actually a self-defeating asshat in a trenchcoat,” Merle says in the same, smooth, wondering tone. “Coral fixation, not causation.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He stares at her, patient and waiting like he didn’t just take a scientific term he doesn’t understand and slam-dunk it over her head. Something shifts in her gut reorients itself until she is dizzy from her world whizzing around its dias.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup zeroes in on the obvious before thinking about the utterly un-profound wisdom and sheer Dad energy rolling off Merle right now. “Did— did we burn down your greenhouse to work through my survivor’s guilt?” She asks, feeling the sting of whiplash hotter than the heat of glass at her back. “Did I just get had into healthy communication? Is that what this is?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’m an opportunist.” Merle shrugs, lifting both hands. “Figured I oughta be able to salvage something from this.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“We still need that medicine.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Gimme two weeks, and I’ll rebuild.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They douse the flames, although the fire had already claimed all of the viable specimens they could have used. Lup does it robotically, not paying attention to the cuts on her hands as she pulls root to root to root from the heat-packed soil. Correlation, she thinks. A coincidence that is not the cause of the assumed reaction. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The Starblaster, streaking down a ray of silver light from the sky, observing, watching, helping where they can because they have to with what they know. The Light of Creation, bright and volatile, reacting without purpose, without reason or pattern because creation is unpredictable but not inherently malicious. The Hunger, not chasing them, but satisfaction, sation it will never fill, because it has been trying for decades, years, long before the Starblaster came along, and their crew was not always there to stand in its way. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Correlation</span>
  </em>
  <span>, she thinks and feels better, lighter. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Not causation</span>
  </em>
  <span>. </span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The planet they land on in cycle sixty-nine is a plane abundant with greenery, trees towering higher than any building she’s seen, forests so thick that their canopies obscure the tree beds from any kind of sunlight. They fly the Starblaster over the island they find, hundreds of feet in the air, and the rough burlap of the forest goes on forever past the horizon, a veritable ocean of green.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You don’t like these plants?” She asks Merle who staunchly refuses to forge a path through the trees to find other life forms. “But you’re a cleric of shrubbery, aren’t you supposed to ‘love all’ or some shit?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I love grass and begonias and bell peppers, sure,” Merle argues. “But those guys all— they sort of speak to me!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“And these trees don’t?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He wrinkles the bridge of his nose. “They kinda whisper sometimes. Give me the heebie-jeebies.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>So, Merle, unexpectedly enough, spends his time avoiding the forest, which includes most regions of this planet, choosing to spend his time on the ship instead. Lup can understand being freaked out by the local foliage, though. First day they landed, she took one look at the towering behemoths, curled, knobby branches thicker than the width of her room and grimaced. They grew past where trees should normally grow, spreading to the very edge of the island, clinging to the elevated outcroppings with the determination of plants that hadn’t been discouraged enough by others on the evolutionary ladder. If there were any others.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Do you think they even make oxygen?” Lup mutters to Lucretia as they wait for Barry to finish his tests on the very carefully extracted air samples he’d collected.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think they’re cursed as hell, and that we wouldn’t know until we got a nice big breathful,” She replies, sketching the enormous outline of the island from a comfortable distance away. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lucretia volunteers almost eagerly with Magnus and Davenport, to go see what they can find, a development they’re all still getting used to. Lup blinks when she puts her hand up before she can offer herself, but something unfurls in her chest and she grins at the glint in her friend’s eye, like flint sparking into a blaze. Lucretia carries herself like her bones are made of steel, unyielding, she has settled into her skin.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They wave bye to the trailblazers, Stones of Farspeech for each of them, a promise to call back every night for updates on their progress, and enough transmuted rations to last two months. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>At night, the roots, swirling and hanging in the water glow luminescent, not unlike a sea of stars. They glimmer, shining like gossamer threads woven through with gold beads that cast the deck a mottled blue, blurring and dancing across silver metal and age-old aluminum. The bond engine spins at a slower speed, lights spinning lazily at the loss of half of the crew, white-yellow light mingling the aqua into a sickly green daybreak that turns half the ship emerald. Or mildew, depending on how uncharitable she’s feeling.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s early on in the cycle, and Lup taps the last few crumbs from her plate of halibut cheese melt into the garbage, mourning the soon to be lack of dairy as the small amount they’d managed to fit into the fridge from the last cycle ran out. Merle’s working on the little garden he made to keep himself occupied, citing that they’d need a lot of vegetables to keep variety in their diet, which she finds herself hard-pressed to argue with. They eat a lot of fish.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You would think she’s learned to keep herself occupied during the long cycles by now and Lup idly wonders about popping into Barry’s rooms later, pulling him away from his experiments for a swim. Whenever he gets into the water, his face melts, the little furrow in his brow smoothing out, and if there’s one thing a world full of nothing but trees and water is good for, it’s swimming.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup’s just about to start on the dishes, Mage Hand of course, because why not burn a spell slot on menial tasks if you’re gonna spend the day bored, which she had already decided to allocate this particular Thursday for. Steps crept up on her from behind, thumping and then halting at the doorway.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey, Koko, got any more dishes while I—” She turns, glancing over at him and his face is reluctant, pale, and he’s still holding Barry’s lunch, halibut cheese melt and all.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s placed down on the table with a clink. Somehow, Lup knows, even before he says, “Barry’s dead. He’s in the lab, face-down, I dunno how long for.” She still has her hands in front of her, ready to cast Mage Hand.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, shit.” She replies woodenly, and then at Taako’s shoulders rising uncomfortably, continues, “No, I’m— that’s not okay, but it’s not like this is our first rodeo. We’ll deal.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Uh, alright, well, I hate to be insensitive and all that, but… do you wanna help me with his body?” Her brother asks, and then at her squint. “I meant say goodbye. For the year.” Taako deflates. “I would’ve taken care of it myself, but I thought it might be an experiment that offed cha’boy and didn’t wanna hurl myself off the mortal coil too, so…”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Barry’s body is stiff, cool and clammy when she gets there and his head is pressed flat against the desk like so many other times she’s found him asleep in the middle of the night. If it weren’t for the paper-like skin, Lup could almost see him blink, rub at his eyes wearily and wince because he forgot to take his glasses off again, and give her that tired little smile. The one that says, ‘I love you’ even when he isn’t fully awake like it’s the first thing he thinks when he wakes up. I love you.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Merle glances around the room, and they levitate him onto a transmuted dinghy. There’s a twig on the table, in a small petri dish, with round nubs for leaves tinted a deep purple, tainted.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“This is a specimen from the forest,” Lup thinks out loud. “You don’t think—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Taako’s eyes widen the same time the thought flashes across her mind, and then they are both scrabbling for their Stones of Farspeech, because the thing about loyalty is it demands you try, that you give every effort no matter if you already know what happens next, even if you could time the beat of this song and dance to your heartbeat. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Magnus?” She nearly yells into the stone as Merle looks between the two of them, realization dawning. Taako calls Lucretia’s name into his stone, and Magnus doesn’t pick up. She has never wanted to smash this thing so much. “Magnus, for god’s sake,” Lup growls at it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hi, Luce? Lucey, y’all checked out on your end?” Taako says into his and she almost jumps him when she looks to see him picking up. “Look, you guys haven’t gotten any sniffles lately, have you?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her hands are curled into fists, like a coil ready to spring but nothing to spring at. Their crewmates are a week into the forest at this point, and last time they tried to fly the Starblaster over the forest, it looked like a field of lumpy grass like it could be a floor all its own. No way to track them down, no way to catch up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Uhuh, uhuh, Magnus was coughing earlier today?” Merle takes her hand, which she appreciates, and then appreciates it more when she sees he’s taken the care to hold the life-ending stick in tweezers in his other hand. “I’m gonna pass you over to Merle, see if he’s got any ‘don’t die painful deaths in butt-fuck nowhere’ tips.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Merle raises an eyebrow at her as he’s handed the Stone of Farspeech and then tosses the tiny specimen overboard. Taako whirls and it soars further from the ship with a blast of wind. Then, her wand is in her hand, though she can’t remember unholstering it, and with needle-thin precision, strikes it out of the sky with ice-cold eyes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“See if you can avoid touching the big guy, and uh, any kind of leaves that are round and also kinda purple. Poisonous plants, actually,” Merle’s lip curls as he speaks. “Yeah, I get you’re in a forest, just— do your best not to die.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They hang up with promises that they’ll call back in the morning to give an update on Magnus’s condition and their status. “I’ll see you when we get the hell out of this forest,” Davenport promises her and doesn’t say how. “We’ll talk in the morning, guys. Stay— just do your best in the meantime, alright.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The dinghy floats past the Starblaster into the ocean that sunset and Lup holds her wand to the quickly fading daylight, showering Barry in light that blurs against the firelight gleam of the sun on water. It is not goodbye, she knows, only a kiss, like the kind they give each other before bed each night. It says, I’ll see you in the morning, when the day is new and I am older, but I will live it with you at my side. This time Lup thinks, </span>
  <em>
    <span>I miss you</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Then, morning comes, and none of them call back. Evening comes and Lup finally puts down her stone, fingers sore and every muscle tense with anger, simmering because rage burns her hot in the depths of her stomach, like a gnawing beast raking claws over its own skin because there is nowhere for it to go, and because her grief can no longer be shrouded by the beast’s presence. She tried all their stones, and then the three back ups just in case it was some kind of long-distance call issue, or weird signal, but no. There’s no one there to pick up.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This is what they do. Lup, tearing through Lucretia’s room for notes because Barry was their backup pilot, she zoned back at the IPRE training lifetimes ago, and it sure as hell wasn’t going to be Merle flying this thing. They eat fish every day because Taako’s pretty fucking great at transmutation, dudes, but he can only turn fish into other kinds of fish. Anchovy doesn’t translate well into beef, apparently. The garden suddenly becomes really goddamn important because it is the only thing giving them food that doesn’t taste like clam. Merle starts planting garlic for Taako to keep making estrogen for her, and all of them swear off eating any food from the death forest. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Finding the Light of Creation becomes an unspoken loss. It landed somewhere in the forest, they’re pretty sure, and there’s no way in hell they can spare anyone else. They do twice their normal tasks, and it is stilted and it is awkward with their dynamic thrown off so wildly because there was a time her and Taako were the only things the other had, but that has changed, and she is only now realizing it’s not a change the two of them can recover from. They aren’t a two-person circus, which means for the first time since she stepped off a planet with a purple sunset, Lup is remembering why loving more than what she can protect is being vulnerable. It’s leaving yourself open to wounds that fester where you cannot reach.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>These are the thoughts of an elf without her family, and she does her best to ignore them, pestering Merle into letting her help with the fertilizer, or pulling out Taako’s surfboard to skim along the still ocean.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She can’t fathom a year alone, uses the two people she has left like crutches. Lup turns down the hall to Magnus’s room to ask for a spar, walks onto the deck, expecting to see Lucretia curled up with her notebook, and finds only bitterness in these empty pockets where once there was a home. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Good fucking riddance.” Taako snarls a few days before the Hunger is due to burst from the sky and tear this planet to shreds, consuming until the endless forest and ocean depths are finally eclipsed with a force larger than themselves. “Nothing here worth saving anyway.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She hums. “We never found out if there were any natives.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Never met ‘em means they don’t exist.” He snorts. “I can live with a planet of hypothetical people dying.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The wheel of the ship sits in front of her, silver and alien. Lup knows now, how to drive this thing, and there’s no better planet to practice on with the empty miles of water, no obstacles to crash into. She puts her hands on the cool metal and hates every moment she has to.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Can you?” Lup asks because there is a difference between knowing your actions cause no one harm, and assuming. “S’not like there’s anything we can do about it now, but if there are people who live here…”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Look, priority numero one stands, get ourselves the hell out of here,” Taako says, firmly enough she can tell it is a veneer for his discomfort. “We can play philosophy 101 or whatever, hey, what makes a place irredeemable, but it doesn’t matter. We do our best and you know what?” His voice goes shrill, raising by small decibels, and Lup stares. “Fuck whatever decided us seven idiots get to Judge and Jury these places!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There is caring, and there is apathy. There is also pretending nothing outside your front door exists because if it does, you have a responsibility to go out and do something about it. Lup understands choosing not to care, she just can never bring herself to do it. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wow.” She responds, and says, “kinda went somewhere just now, huh,” instead of anything emotionally vulnerable.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Taako releases a breath of air, like a single gusty laugh. “Someone’s gotta be fucked up by the moral implications of our situation, and I figured if you were gonna be all ‘I’m dead inside’ about it, I might as well snatch the position while it’s up for grabs.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The halls of the ship run empty into each other, silent and unwalked as they never are, whether it’s Lucretia treading them into the early morning, herself deciding three in the morning is a good time to bake a cake. The wheel, grasped in her hands, the displacement of air, a breath sucked from her lungs, her family, gutted, bones like a frame wrenched apart. She turns, and Taako is still there. They both are, and it’s enough, for now. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And it shouldn’t be up to them, to decide what makes a life unsalvageable, whether or not it’s okay to turn their back on a planet, no matter the harm it has done to them because a child, knees scraped from running does not know the difference between assault and righteous vengeance. They do what they can, still.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Thanks,” Lup knocks her head lightly on his arm, pressed to the side of the starboard seat. “Y’know, for not being an idiot and getting yourself killed.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He wraps an arm around her side, and she hugs his waist like they are both children, shoulders bumping as a caravan jostles along the road, a thin blanket pulled over their laps but no heat save for the warm length of a bony embrace. Lup closes her eyes, and there’s no smell of hay, horse hair and dust so thick she could choke on it, but her brother, Taako is familiar with his fingers, soft on her side no matter how biting and sharp he snaps. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The feel of his ribs inflating as he breaths is familiar too. “Yeah, I know, I’m the best twin in the world—” Lup squawks, protesting. “Not like it’s hard with the bar being ‘don’t die,’ doofus. Gotta get yourself some higher standards.” His voice tremors, just barely, but Lup has perfect pitch when it comes to her brother’s voice.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think we’ll be good so long as you keep it up.” Lup smiles against his side. “Let’s get off this hell-planet.”</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>The sky here is blue, bright and azure. Her comets streak from the sky and Lup grits her teeth when she sees she has only managed to bring down three instead of the four that should result from Meteor Shower. She bites back the frustration in the pit of her stomach and picks up the notebook at her side.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>They leave craters in the ground, her stars plucked from the sky and thrown against the soft open plains of this world. The long walk around all three of them slows her heart rate as Lup scratches down her progress. It’s thirty meters around each crater, which is better than yesterday’s twenty-eight, or a week ago even, when she could only make two meteors. The hills around her lay puckered and misshapen from her attempts, but it’s better here, out in the open rather than close to any structured city or foliage she might very well burn to the ground accidentally. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup is making progress, a lot of progress, she knows, because ninth level spells? Those are hard, but it’s still not enough and that’s what grates on her. Even once she learns this spell, will it be enough? When every bit of firepower they unleash is only a brief pause in the world’s complete annihilation? She can throw everything she’s got at the Hunger and it won't flinch, though the moon itself could crash into its side.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>By the time she makes her way back, Lup stands at the arm of the couch in the communal living room and flops onto it face first. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Bad day?” She’d barely looked to see who it was she’s bothering, but it’s Barry’s voice that comes gruff and fond from a cushion over.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup groans, muffled, into the padded velvet. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Have you learned how to rain down fiery hell yet, babe?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She rolls onto her back and chuckles despite herself. “I always bring the thunder, new spell or not, nerdboy.” Lup tosses him her notebook, trusting him to make out the angry scrawl digging into the pages. “Got any tips on how to own a spell six seconds flat?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You and Taako would know best,” Barry returns absentmindedly, flipping through her papers. “Pick up magic like nothing I’ve ever seen. We were visiting that diplomat's house, back on uh, Derminnia?” He squints. “They had good garlic bread, but when we sit down, Taako fucking turns one of the chairs into this goddamn throne, insults the decor, and then settles in for negotiations like he didn’t just dunk on their whole life.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup laughs, her torso curling as she sits up on the couch. “Cha’boy likes to play cool, but Koko is a nerd. And you have forgotten that the witching hours are for witching.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Is that what you do when you crawl out of bed?” Barry plops down next to her, closing the book. “You’re kidding? You skip morning snuggles, to go </span>
  <em>
    <span>study</span>
  </em>
  <span>?” She hums, noncommittal, because that is an excellent excuse for insomnia and Lup is an opportunist. “Alright, you never get to call me a nerd again.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Try and stop me, nerdboy,” Lup crows, whacking the side of his arm. “Once a loser always a loser.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He frowns exaggeratedly for a moment, before grinning and leaning over. “Bad news,” Barry teases and then darts forward with a kiss. “It’s contagious,” and he smacks her on the cheek with another one, short and chaste, but warm and tingly where he leaves the soft imprints of his lips.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup pulls him in for another kiss, longer this time, cradles his cheeks, and grins into it with all the swelling happiness she can feel chasing away her earlier frustration, and love she feels for this ridiculous, awesome, amazing, jean-clad man. He pushes his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose, with thick, clumsy fingers, smile crooked and dazed on his face like so many fireworks, bright and joyful in the curve of his lip.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Barry blinks and shakes his head, and she deflates because that means no more kissing. “Wait, wait, I completely forgot, I wanted to talk to you about something.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He pulls her into his room, far away from prying ears and his idea is way better than more kissing. Power, at the tips of her fingers, enough to push back, and a fleeting chance they can get this right. Lup knows some Necromancy now, enough to nearly rival Barry, and this isn’t just some pet project they can plug away at for a couple of weeks and be done with. This is going to take defiance, the magical equivalent of a middle finger to the natural order of things, but Lup has never been very good at following rules.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s funny, because from what Merle has told them about the Hunger, it is a being, focused on ending existence, but what she has always seen of it is a ravenous, slavering beast, descending from the heavens, smoke tendrils uncaring of what they destroyed. He says it’s miserable, and she doesn’t know why spreading that misery will make it any better, because there are screams in the air, and fear sounds the same everywhere, fists flying heavy as thunder and the ripping of an explosion, madness and chaos. People cry, angels have come to strike them down for the sin of existence, but these beings have wings made from ash and they are empty even for all they have taken within themselves.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The next plane they find themselves in comes like a miracle, and it is perfect for the ritual they’ve been planning for months now. A place where magic intermingles with the laws of science, and it sits heavy, pulsating, and thrumming where it wasn’t eradicated by its crushing descent. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It is ironic, and miraculous that things have lined up this way, and when they first come up with their plan, Lup laughs until her hands shake and her sides hurt. Because to become liches, they need an Achilles Heel, not a weakness in the traditional sense, but a tie to their existence so they don’t get swept along in the treacherous waters of the Styx. And it will stand against everything the Hunger literally embodies.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Holy shit,</span>
  </em>
  <span> she thinks. </span>
  <em>
    <span>We’re going to save everyone with the power of love</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It’s that same cycle, and the change is at once everything like she thought it would be, and absolutely nothing like they’d imagined. Magic is unrestrained. It’s uncontrollable and the more of it you take, the less it’s like blowing bubbles through a plastic wand and the more it becomes like trying to lasso a tornado. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup feels it, rising from her body, in her lich form now, and as she holds out her arms, they shake with the sheer raw energy contained within her very being. It feels like they’ll shudder and convulse apart, in fact, </span>
  <em>
    <span>she</span>
  </em>
  <span> feels like she’ll dissipate, fracture onto raw energy. But she sees the ship above her, small figures leaning over the railing and instead, Lup unleashes an explosion. It rushes over her like static for a second, and then it booms, a roar so loud it doesn’t stop ringing in her ears. Her explosion swirls around the pillar, climbing higher and higher, a furious battle of red-hot light like molten glass against contorting smog.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She is blown back by the force of the collision, but Lup feels strong, stronger than she ever has before, standing before a force greater than the mass of the sky and taking one thing. Just one thing away from it. She reforms, breathless and adrenaline pumping through her veins, unminding of her death because Lup is standing at the edge of a precipice, a tipping point they only need to pull themselves over. The final stretch, she can feel it. They’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>so</span>
  </em>
  <span> close.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Taako can say what he wants about bad clowns and clashing accessories. Lup feels like she could have been born with this thing in her hand. The Umbra Staff is the sickest umbrella to grace existence with its presence, much like herself.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She darts through an obstacle course, full of lightning-quick targets, automated pistons from the walls charged with curses that whiz through the air like technicolour flashes, and some that hold no trace as they hit true not. A flash of glinting metal nearly lands her face-first on the floor, but she nimbly dances over it, keeping a keen eye out for her target, a tiny mouse who serves as a familiar to one of the magistrates.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A shuttering sound emerges from the wall, and in the center of the maze, with objects flying around her, with the walls themselves fighting her back, Lup stops. Time to give this baby a spin. It unfurls at her thoughts, the spindles of the umbrella contorting and forcing themselves unnaturally forward. There’s a gleam of light from a round piston on the wall, like malice glinting in an eye, but before the airborne spell can touch her, the Umbra Staff gulps it down, long metal ribs undulating in a gruesome mockery of the movement.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It snaps shut and she curls her hand around it with no small amount of satisfaction. The rest of the obstacle course doesn’t prove to be much of a challenge, and she walks out of it with the little mouse held cupped in both hands.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I didn’t want to use my new gear on this little guy,” Lup explains, dropping him into the hands of one of the magistrates, a halfling woman with sleek back hair and wide cheekbones. “Wasn’t sure if he’d come back if I, uh, ate his magic.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You—” Lilia doesn’t seem to notice the return of her familiar, even scurrying around in her palms as he is. “You really did it. Your staff–”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wicked cool, right?” She slings it over her shoulder, satisfaction curling her gut. “Way better than some plain ol’ breastplate or dumb KrebStar.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The smaller woman blinks and stares at her. Lup shifts in spot, only a little uncomfortable at the extra attention.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“It could be classified as an item of the forbidden arcanas.” </span>
  <em>
    <span>Cool</span>
  </em>
  <span>, she was about to say, but the magistrate hurried on. “Which is to say, extremely lethal, and a danger to the population as a whole. That kind of magic…” Lilia shakes her head, half in disbelief, “I don’t think I would be capable of making an artifact with that sort of precision. I don’t think </span>
  <em>
    <span>anyone</span>
  </em>
  <span> here would be able to.” Half terror, rearing up in her pupils, abyssal. “How did you </span>
  <em>
    <span>do</span>
  </em>
  <span> that?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup grips the deep purple fabric of its top. “Um, I just sort of… did? It’s a bit like a dowsing rod, or a, hmm, a siphon? Both, actually, and add a bit of elbow grease and voila!” She flourishes the tip in front of her and Lilia takes a step back. “Potentially society-endangering creation!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Very cool,” she agrees slowly. “How long were you and your friends staying again?”</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Turns out most of the professors are a little pee-your-pants scared of items that could, well. Eat their own. It’s not like it was particularly difficult. It had taken her the better part of a year, but—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Alright. Every plane they visit has a countdown timer, from the moment they set foot on it, and in that time, they have to go out and commit every spell, every skill and tactic they could find to memory and weaponize it. Lup would be remiss to say she hadn’t noticed the others expanding their repertoire as the years flew by, but until now it hadn’t really occurred to her. They’d been gathering knowledge, accumulating arcane power for longer than most humans were alive, stealing discoveries utterly unattainable to most, and maybe, somewhere along the line that meant they’d… accelerated, past what people usually achieved in their lifetime.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There is a girl, nearly a century younger than herself, who would have beamed in gratification, felt it in the marrow of her bones to hear that. To know she is stronger than almost every single person she comes across, that the too-small shoes and cheap jewelry don’t cling to her gait, caravan dust does not immediately shoot her down from every opportunity like a recoiling hand. Lup gains no satisfaction from this.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Against an enemy that consumes galaxies, she still isn’t strong enough. None of them are, no matter the mastery they hold over their chosen field, and if she could turn her Umbra Staff on the sky, she would.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It doesn’t sink in at first, when they first find the Light. What actually happens is, Lucretia catches it, falling from the sky as it carves a clear path, smack dab in an isolated area closest to a city this world calls Goldcliff.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup holds the light in her hands as they recover it, and it’s warm in her palms, not the heat of a light source or fire, but the warmth of a living being. She looks around at the others, Taako at her side, Merle, Bary with his arms slumped and a crooked grin. Magnus looks around, eyes wide, and the thought occurs to her, distantly, disbelievingly, that this is home now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She looks around too then, at the forest surrounding them that fails to be notable in any particular way, and feels silly.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Welcome home, I guess,” Davenport laughs and someone chuckles nervously, though Lup doesn’t look to see who.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Wait! Wait,” Magnus says, holding his hands out in front of him excitedly as if to keep them in place. “I have an idea, just let me— I’m gonna go get something, I’ll be right back!” He runs back inside the ship, leaving them to stand, processing the grass and the blue lure of the sky that have all suddenly become something significant because this is the sky they will live under from now on. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey, Luce,” She calls out because she has been the one most reluctant for this plan, and Lup wants to see how she feels, now that it’s becoming a reality for all of them. “What do you think?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I think this grass is looking like some of the best damn grass I’ve ever seen,” Luce replies with a shaky smile, still uncertain. “Look, Lup are— are we sure about this? Well, and truly sure, while we still have the chance— the choice not to do this? Can we really unleash hell on this place? Lup,” She leans in, walking closer. “You once asked us why we would ever even consider destroying a planet, how that makes us better than the Hunger. I guess I’m just wondering how we can consider this an acceptable alternative.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup runs a tongue over her dry lips, because to defeat The Hunger, there is no perfectly moral answer. No way to bring it down, fists swinging.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“This planet is going to go through,” Lup huffs, thinking of all they’ve done because of the Light, “a lot. But at this point, we’re just doing the best with what we have. People are going to get hurt, but not everyone, not this entire world, so in a way…” She hesitates, “we’re minimizing the damage.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lucretia bites her lip, tucking it into her front teeth slightly, and she parts them as if to say something, a better option, she’ll insist, as they have spoken about before, but she visibly pulls herself back. “Right.” She sighs. “We can’t be as bad as The Hunger so long as we don’t actively try to destroy entire worlds, right?” The statement is only tinged bitter.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Lucretia—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No.” She interrupts before Lup can get another word out. “No, I get it. There is no ‘right’ answer. Only slightly better scenarios, only compromise. Yeah.” Lup wishes she could offer some sort of appeasement, some kind of promise, like Magnus, that they would listen to her because they value her opinion. And Lup does. She loves Lucretia, and in return she is one of the best people she’s had the pleasure of knowing. Eyes like twin suns, a love for the people, the things and history and culture around her unmatched by anyone else on the crew.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>But there is no other option. When they refer to bonds as strings, as interconnecting rays of light binding them together, it isn’t inaccurate. There’s a connection between every living thing, between all the planes, but their strings don’t form a spiderweb, a latticework quilt of shimmering love. Instead, it’s more of a… house of cards. Each card intricately balanced, relying on the others to stay in place, because the strings are more than proof of a love so strong it has arcane form; they are crucial in the complicated, interwoven thing that makes up existence. Bonds are more than proof of love, though that’s what they’re made of, they are the things that fashion being itself.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>That’s why Lucretia’s plan would never work. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The Starblaster, their home which has served as such for the past hundred years, has become more than a home because it is a siphon, a glowing ethereal being where they have connected each other on such intimate levels that the bonds powering the ship were born upon it. Lup wonders sometimes how the others don’t feel it, their connection to each other flying it through the sky just as much as Davenport.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey,” She says, knocking shoulders to Lucretia’s fondly. “Things are going to be okay. We’re gonna be fine, and you know what? So will every plane after this one, because the Hunger will have no reason to attack them.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lucretia huffs, and wraps an arm quickly around Lup’s side, letting go before she can return the partial hug. “Alright, I get it.” Luce concedes, and then with a forceful confidence, diamond and spine straight as a book. “We can do this.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Magnus bounds back down the hill, something small and metallic in his hand. “Hey, guys! I got it! Can you all just—” he pushes them together, herding Barry and Taako from the treeline, wrapping an arm around Merle’s shoulder, “there!”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It glints in the sun above their heads, and with a start, Lup realizes it’s her camera. When did she stop using it? Taking pictures, saving memories, all those things that’d once seemed so important?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Magnus looks up at it with a grin wide-enough to split his face and then at them. “What should we say?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Cheese is traditional,” Davenport inputs.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No way in hell—” </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“In the name of Pan.” Merle’s and Taako’s voices overlap.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Magnus shrugs. “We could all say our favourite breed of dog.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t really—” </span>
  <em>
    <span> care</span>
  </em>
  <span>, Lup is about to interject wearily.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“How about ‘home?’” Lucretia offers, voice cutting in against the others, and she glances at Lup as she does, face fragile, an open palm, an offered branch. “To commemorate the occasion,” She only flushes a little as the others turn to stare at her.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“God, you’re such a sap, Luce,” Taako teases and then swings an arm around her shoulder. Barry peers at her, and none of them have aged for a century, but he looks as though every part of him has exhaled and seems younger for it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup looks up at the camera, </span>
  <em>
    <span>her</span>
  </em>
  <span> camera, still poised in the air. “I like it,” she says. “Good way to roll out the welcome mat, y’know, call dibs, dirty the furniture up a bit. Let’s make ourselves comfortable.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Then on three!” Magnus strains his arms high enough to get them all in, counting up as they all smile wide, relief in every slope of their shoulders, sore ankles, because it has been a long journey. Lup stares at the sun, dazed by its brightness even as she is steadied by hands, holding her arm, around her shoulders. Her family’s got her, just like always and she musters up a smile for the hazed glow of the sky. “Say ‘home!’”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Home!” A chorus, reverberating ugly and messy, clashing in different tones and inflections, rings around them and the smallest thrill of excitement shoots through her chest. It feels good to have her feet planted on the ground and know they’re there to stay for once. </span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Making the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet is easier than becoming a lich, but it causes more devastation than Lup has in the past decade or so since she became one. It’s not just destruction it wreaks, because you can always tell when there has been war, when a village has been ravaged down to the bones of itself, families struggling out of their homes, food left rotting in the fridge from an evacuation forcing everyone out. There’s none of that, when she looks for the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet, and it isn’t hard to.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Obsidian circles score the earth, blacker than the night sky, and the deliverance her relic offers is complete. It is total. She chases it down, never to grab it back, though the others have taken to eyeing her suspiciously when she does go down to the surface. They never say anything.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup doesn’t visit often, only when she feels she absolutely must, and it stings, to stand above it all, to remain so utterly unaffected, but it is hard to bear. She remembers walking through the aisles of a store in Neverwinter specializing in magical items, handing over a bit of obsidian and watching in horror as the cashier’s face crumpled, looking at it. The quiver in her eyes, as she put a hand to her mouth and hastily let another worker take her place. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She walks by the bathroom one morning, passing it by before taking a few steps back as she sees tubes, little containers of cream and a box of tissue paper all carefully laid out on the counter in front of the mirror. Magnus is bent in front of it, closing the cupboard doors.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey, uh, Magnus?” Lup questions, pausing in the door frame. “Whatcha doing there? Not hiding any injuries are you, because, despite all evidence to the contrary, Merle does actually know some healing spells—”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No,” he hurriedly reassures. “No, it’s— I’m okay, it’s this little ritual of mine, because everytime I die the… black eye.” Magnus stares into the mirror for a moment, at the clear lack of black eye. “Oh.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup remembers the skirmish he got caught up in on his way back from this little western town on the fringes of the continent, how he had to claw his way out before he was caught up in the struggle for the Occulus, how he came back chest heaving and eyes wild. Displacer beasts, Magnus had muttered at their administrations. Things that shifted with the shadows, blurred the edges of space and their memories along with it. She winces at the reminder. It’s only a little past the one-year mark and they're all still a little on edge, waiting for the inevitable waterfall at the end of this river, the boot to drop.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“You— you know you didn’t die during that fight, right?” She chuckles, and Magnus gives a small laugh too. “Good thing too, no save files anymore. You’re gonna have to switch things up, my dude. Stop throwing yourself headfirst into everything, capiche?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He deflects, and says, “I came back this time, didn’t I?” Then, as she levels him an unimpressed eyebrow. “C’mon, I’m still getting used to things. Like, right now, I know I didn’t die, but getting injured, and then coming back here, being on the deck again…” Magnus runs a hand through his hair, ruffling the thick auburn. “Is it just me that thinks it’s weird? I mean, it feels weird, because we’re all still here, but… everything’s different.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Yeah,” Lup replies, because she sees it, in little ways through all of them. “I get it.” Everything’s the same. Nothing’s the same.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Davenport, flying through hobbies faster than he ever did on any of their cycles, desperate to find something to do to keep himself occupied, aimless. Lucretia, holed up in her room near constantly these days. Sometimes Lup wonders if it’s because she’s too ashamed of the world they’ve made, and sometimes she wonders if it’s because she’s too ashamed of Lup to look her in the eye. She doesn’t see her much, either way. Taako is sharp, acidic as he can make himself when his ears aren’t thick with the cotton indifference he wraps himself in. It’s not exactly the ever-after they dreamed of, any of them. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I’ll adapt,” He assures her and starts packing away the tubes, the tissues. “It’ll just take some time.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sure. We have time,” Lup agrees though this has never been less true for any of them. “You can grow in that beard a bit, watch Fisher get big.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Get a dog,” Magnus thinks aloud and she is gratified to see the brief bolt of enthusiasm cross his face.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She still doesn’t leave the ship much.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup only goes when she needs to, because every step she takes rings with audacity, belligerence, disdain for the people of this world because how dare she breathe its air. She thinks, </span>
  <em>
    <span>I think I might be the reason your whole family is dead. I did that. It’s not that I couldn’t save them this time. I wrote down a number and decided they were the lesser cost</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Or, in simpler words, Lup cannot find it within her to forgive herself.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Hey. How you holding up?” Merle asks, walking to her at the side of the deck where she’s peering down at Faerun. “Thinking of going planetside?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She gives a half-laugh. “No, Merle, you don’t need to worry. Not planning on tracking the gauntlet anytime soon.” Lup gestures to the North, where Fort Haverglass once stood, tall and towering two weeks previous. “Pretty sure it’s still too early for it to resurface anyway.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s not what I meant,” he pauses, unsure and weirdly careful. “Look, Lup, your brother’s really worried about you, we all are, and I was just wondering if you were planning on getting out anytime soon, leaving the Starblaster.” Merle raises an eyebrow, anticipating her response, “For reasons that don’t have to do with—” and he splays his fingers in the manner of an explosion.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Oh.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Are you okay?” Merle questions. “Cause I know things seem pretty shitty right now, but hey. They could be worse, right?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Sure.” Lup agrees. “To be honest, I— when we started all this, I knew things would get bad, but—” She stops, unsure of how to continue. “I heard about the Moonshae Isles, Merle. It’s horrific, and I’m sorry if it’s insensitive to ask, but, did you know? Did you think something like that would happen when you were making the Gaia Sash?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He rubs at the back of his head. “Well, I— uh. I. No.” Merle answers, firmly. “I didn’t really plan for things going belly-up the way they are now. I have a feeling you didn’t either, concocting this whole, master plan you and Barry made.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She laughs even though it isn’t funny, but at the same time, it is. It’s hysterical how severely they underestimated the sheer power the relics have even having experienced the force of nature that turns civilizations to dust beneath their feet. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“No. It really isn’t what we thought it’d be at all.” Lup says finally. “I… don’t envy Magnus right now. At least I know in quantifiable measures where my relic is.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Typhoon’s pretty hard to miss,” he agrees, and they both watch Faerun spinning below, spitting below, fire and monsters no one being should be able to harness, but now can and it is a massacre, unending, turning the picturesque sphere of life she once thought could have been home into rubble. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She is tired. Not just because the reprieve Lup thought they’d earned isn’t coming to fruition, but because she is constantly fighting with herself, turning the same thoughts over and over until her hands ache and her joints creak, mind splitting, as she thinks, one more time. Lup clings so hard to her thoughts they hurt, like raking herself over barbed wire again and again because she can’t stop, she can’t stop until… something. Until something happens.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>And she hates this too, even now, staring down through the Starblaster’s bubble, cocooning, suffocating, protecting them all from the chaos they caused, standing high in the heavens where nothing can touch them. Lup pictures bonds, stretching down from the silver-sharp hull of the ship, but instead of connecting them to the surface they are silk threads, dancing, swaying, shivering at their pull from beyond the clouds. There are clouds in the sky, there are orchestrators, there are gods in the sky, but they are not kind, not to this planet, not to themselves. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“I don’t know why I thought we could ever be happy here,” Lup quietly admits, an admission of shame. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“Well, it’s not like it’s gonna be this way forever,” he chortles and then looks at her. She feels thin and wavering; she could sink into the shape of the air behind her. “It can’t be. It’s just not— it’s not sustainable is what it is.”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“That’s the point of this plan, Merle. The entire logic behind it relies on this place being like this,” smoke drifts up toward them, lazy, swirling. Another fight. Another battle, “forever.” Lup finishes. Maybe it’s the Animus Bell this time. Been a while since they saw that one.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>He shoves his hands in his pocket. “Huh. Don’t know if they’re gonna last much longer like this. There’s no way we could give them a break or something? Gather ‘em up for a little bit?”</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>She’s about to reiterate her last explanation, that no, that’s not how this works, but Lup looks out, past fields and landmarks, people, all of which have dramatically decreased in abundance since they arrived. She wonders how long it’ll be before circles of glass outnumber the amount of cities left. Lup grips the railing, feeling the bite of the metal crease into her palm, until her palms are white, knuckles white, they have committed unspeakable crimes against this world and she wants—</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>To make it right. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her shoulders loosen at the admittance, the tucked-away thought finally blatant and bold in her mind. This isn’t right. It never was. Lucretia saw it before all of them and about this, at the very least, she was correct. They made a mistake, but unlike The Hunger’s form of destruction, this time, there is still a world left to save.  in her slots into place, assurance maybe, blind determination, and she looks down at Faerun with new eyes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>“There’s an idea,” She says, replying to Merle.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Inaction has never sat well with Lup anyway.</span>
</p>
<p> </p><hr/>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She sits at the crest of a hill, grass shimmering with the sun’s rays, a battle raging below, but not for long. This is the last time she will ever have to stand back and let something happen. They thought they were close, all that time ago, and maybe that made them reckless, careless, let them settle for the first solution that offered respite.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The sky here is blue, not purple, but still a cool colour, and it is cloudless, unburdened by the village below the hill tearing itself to pieces under the influence of the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Will the others forgive her? For going behind their backs on a plan she helped come up with in the first place? Lup hopes so. It’s not as if she abandoned them. She’s just… vacationing, in a way. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going this time, unlike the quick pop-ins to Neverwinter, Rockport. It’d been too nerve-wracking to wonder if they would see the lie in her face after one hundred years of living on a ship powered by their relationships. A note would have to do.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There’s a dark grey smoke billowing up from the northmost side of Bronzeton, blackened with ash and a furious heat the smoke of cannons booming through the valley cannot hope to emulate. She squints, waiting for the inevitable push of heat, and the smoke expands into a cloud, shimmering like the first few sparks of a firework, flaring outward and further into the village until she can smell the smoke instead of just seeing it. Lup doesn’t witness the destruction of Bronzeton, however much she wishes she could. The force of its death is shining, bright, and for a single instance, the town is a supernova, collapsing infinitely within itself and taking everyone else too, burning against the inside of her eyelids even with her arm held in front of her face. Maybe she was wrong about the Phoenix Fire Gauntlet. Maybe instead of a simple destruction, burning, fire and flame, it made stars so bright they winked out of existence for being born on the ground rather than amongst galaxies.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The glass is almost cooled by the time she opens her eyes and blinks the neon fuzz patching her vision like dye dropped into clear water. The center of the glass is still a cherry red, though it grows darker, maroon and carnelian as Lup trudges down the hill quickly before the lure attracts a traveler or a wandering merchant to the newly cooled mirror. </span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Her feet thump with the beating of her heart, calling like a war drum that this is the right thing to do. It’s not the only reason she has.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Home has been the Starblaster, for a very long time. It didn’t stop any of them from going soft with awe, with relief and joy upon stepping on this world. Even Taako, even her brother who looks at them with all the fierceness and brilliance he can muster because to him, she knows, they are the only ones worth caring about, the only ones worth saving because they are the ones that </span>
  <em>
    <span>can</span>
  </em>
  <span> be saved. Lup has to fix this, for them, for him because he deserves to have a home made of more than dust.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>I never asked you to do this, you know I would </span>
  </em>
  <span>never</span>
  <em>
    <span> fucking ask</span>
  </em>
  <span>. His voice is clear as a bell in her head, ringing, nasal and tinged with concern, as much as it can be these days when it isn’t hollowed out by apathy so strong Lup could choke on it.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>That’s why I have to</span>
  </em>
  <span>, she thinks back.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Lup steps into Bronzeton, onto Bronzeton with a gentle plink, striding toward the relic she is going to use to make this all right. Her reflection is perfect, and she can see her image making confident steps toward the statue of a tall woman, reaching for the stars, or maybe the gods high above, far beyond her fingertips.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The circle of glass is clear, and in it, Lup is crystalline.</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Content Warnings for: Cults, description of violence, bodies</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Being a reaper isn’t exactly what she told people she wanted to be at the tender age of five, but the job does have its benefits. Switching between power-mode, crackling red lightning splitting off from her lich form, and then rocking a plaid skirt with leather boots for a guest lecture at Taako’s new wizard school is one of them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There were hard parts too, of course. “Last I saw her was yesterday, down by the river bed with that Lopimire boy,” the mother of one of the missing children took a shaky breath, not a reaction to Lup’s skeletal being this time. “You’re sure she was taken? I— I had hoped she’d gone over to her friend’s and forgotten to tell me again.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not with this many disappearances,” Lup tells her and watches as Kelra’s wrinkles deepen around her mouth, becoming decades older with worry. “I’ll check by the riverbed for her next, and…” She hesitates to swear, and then does it anyway, “we’ll swing by to return her by the end of the day.” What’s a promise but some extra motivation anyway.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The gratefulness of the tiefling woman is uncomfortable but easily-handled. It’s not like she hasn’t gotten used to it this past year, what with her re-introduction to society being announced for the entirety of Faerun, beamed directly into their brains. It’s actually better like this, being recognized as a terrifying ghostly figure made of pure arcana rather than Lup, </span>
  <em>
    <span>oh my god you saved the world, Taako’s brother, one of the seven bird's autographs for my collectibles</span>
  </em>
  <span>! It was Kravitz, actually, who’d insisted on them being in work-bodies while carrying out the Raven Queen’s will. Cool guy, that dude. Bit stuck up on what is and isn’t appropriate for work.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She glides to the Rakalnea River, keeping an eye out for Barry or Kravitz as she did. The river is a bubbling mass leading straight out from the town’s sewers and into the ocean around Faerun. The riverbed lay covered in grass instead of mud, unfortunately, so no footprints.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A hooded figure stands at the water’s edge, cloak billowing around him, and something softens in her when she looks to see Barry’s glinting teeth, smile alight. “Hey, babe,” she greets. “Did you track down one of the kidnapees? I went to one of the kid’s places and the last her mom had seen of her was here.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, Barry and I were actually tracking down the residual Necromantic magics in this area,” Kravitz informs. “I used, our uh, goddess’s abilities that you two will eventually be able to sense within yourselves the longer you have this gig—"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And I used my years of experience as a heretic,” Barry announces, and shrugs as Kravitz’s scythe droops in his grip. “Whatever gets the job done, right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And the magic you found… led you two goofballs here.” Lup looks down the river’s path, relatively unoccupied, save for the bridge jutting out around it’s winding path and the sewer’s grated entrance. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, well. We were just figuring out where to go, given that I can only get so specific with the whereabouts of the magic’s origin.” His voice is a little reluctant, pouty she knows now that she spends so much with her brother’s boyfriend. “Been having some difficulties. It all gets sort of muted from here on out.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup wrinkles her nose at the river, smelling of rot and mildew, and whatever people are willing to dump into the manufactured rivers below the city. “Hope you two brought your galoshes,” She states, giving the sewer grate a meaningful glance. “It’s not like there are a lot of places around here that work as hidey holes to whisk children away in the middle of the night.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Barry, bless his soul, practitioner of Necromancy, handler of corpses, dead animals, designated scientist and tester for some pretty gruesome specimens during the Starblaster’s journey, makes a thoroughly disgusted face, lips pulling back into a grimace as he visibly reacts to her meaning.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kravitz sighs. “Oh. Well, that’s quite lovely. Right before the ceremony too.” Like he was planning on wearing his reaper garb to the graduation, long black cloak, skull brooch, leather pants, and all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’ve got like six different animal corpses in the attic and you know it.” She laughs at Barry.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I didn’t bring my nose plugs today,” he counters. “It’s about the air, the sort of sticks-to-the-back-of-your-throat thing you can feel when you inhale, like a mucous layer of...” Barry makes a fake retching noise at the end of his sentence. “We sure we can’t just teleport our way in?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“The tunnel system is too complex. Have to know where we’re going before we get there,” Kravitz shoots him down. “Now, c’mon. Business faces, and try not to scare the children.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She rips the sewer grate off its hinges with a rusted creak, letting the crumpled metal fall to the side of the entrance and stepping into the walkway along the frothing sewage, Barry and Kravitz just behind her. Lup hasn’t been scared of death in a very long time, and she’s grateful for that with this new job, not that she can die. But it does help, makes her footsteps certain, and it feels good to have that surety back now, to know the floor won’t buckle in under her weight, collapse beneath her form like so many layers of fabric. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Shivers run up her arms, and she focuses on the river, the smell of it, how it burbles in her ears, splashing against the walkway, the feel of her feet and the balls of them hitting the beautifully solid ground. She’s here, now, with Barry, with Kravitz and it is real enough to touch. So, she does, lagging behind to take hold of Barry’s hand, who merely grips it, winds his fingers through her own and presses their palms flat together. A soft exhale comes from him, only just audible, and she hears him place his feet in front of each other hard on the concrete, gaining just as much comfort as she does from the small gesture. They have both become clingy, unwilling to separate when they can avoid it, curling up in bed, her legs thrown between his, arms wrapped around each other even in their sleep, and Lup cherishes it. They have a lot of missed time to make up for, but even longer to regain it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>The tunnels reach a split, and they separate as it turns into weaving branches, a complicated system of interconnected pathways. She and Barry go down one he has a good feeling about and Kravitz explores the other.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something echoes down the sewers, resonating in the hollowed caverns, eerie and demanding. A choir in guttural tones, haunted. She glances at Barry and then they are tearing past the line of water rippling at their sides, wind whipping her hair around her face, stone walls and Barry’s hand still in hers. Running in the halls of a singing village is familiar, but the walls here are stone, moss creeping into every crevice it can hook its roots into and they don’t echo the way glass does, the way ice throws sound at you in reflections, in shattered fractals. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They turn once, twice, and there’s a wall of flames thrown up in their way like fire can protect whoever took those children— a cult if the chanting says anything. It flickers blue against the walls, lapping water. Cursed too, given how it burns hot even against the stone and flares out toward them as if to grasp their non-existent bodies like it can protect them from her. Cute.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Barry, you keep holding onto my hand, and I’m going to get us through here,” She tells him, setting a foot back to steady herself. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He nods unflinchingly and unhooks his Stone of Farspeech before saying, “Kravitz, track me and Lup down if you can. We’ve found the home base.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A flame of their own bursts out around them, and Lup fashions it to her will, because the only thing you need to do when it comes to fire is burn hotter, and she leaps through the blue flames, still clutching his hand, warping the cursed flames so they are a part of her shield too. Lup comes out the other side, still burning red and blue, wreathed in it and locks eyes with a circle of hooded members, a group of children sitting still, shivering in the corner of the room, candles and a large, bloody circle waiting.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hello,” She says, and whips out a scythe instead of her Umbra Staff which lays in pieces. It feels more natural in her grip with every passing day. “We’re here to wreck your shit.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Barry rushes past everyone to the huddled kids, knees to their chests, eyes wary and then a hooded figure is lunging at her, light shooting from their wand, only to be eaten by the fire of her shield. Lup darts forward, scythe raised and drops the flame shield so she doesn’t burn the children. It’s a woman with a row of straight bangs who mutters a curse and then fires one too, arm up to defend against Lup’s raised blade, which cuts a line across her chest. She stumbles and then crumples as the end of her scythe slams into her forehead, hitting the ground with a thump.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s a whoosh of air and then force. Something hard slams into her gut and Lup grunts at it. Her scythe is already poised to reach out, and she snatches the nape of her attacker’s neck. He trips forward, hand reaching to his neck at the cut. She takes the opportunity to slam her foot into his stomach and he slams hard into a table behind him, knocking books off it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup pauses to see if he’ll get back up, but his form slumps and crumples to the ground. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She takes a second to breathe, but heavy footsteps come fast behind her, and Lup spins. She knocks the warhammer from an orcish woman’s grip, who hisses. Lup’s blade flashes as it scores into her side, and she gives a pained gasp. She scrambles for a weapon, and Lup kicks aside a dagger that comes skittering her way from the loosened grasp of a halfling laid bare on the floor at the end of Barry’s weapon. Lup brings down the brunt of her weapon, knocking her into unconsciousness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Something bright, white and deadly flares in the corner of her eye, racing toward her quicker than she can hope to turn. A split creases in the air, two sides of reality unraveling to let through a dramatically cloaked, skeletal man, and Kravitz lets the spell pass through the portal.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That was pretty rude of you,” he greets, and Lup races in front of him, swiping her blade through the front robes of a wide-eyed man, who falters as he looks at her and then clutches at his chest at the strike, falling to his knees before toppling to the ground. She raises her blade again, and an elven man with cropped hair drops his weapon, but Lup has learned to save her mercy and does not spare any of it for him.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The only one of them still left awake is the halfling man at Barry’s feet, taking careful breaths, tense with a scythe the size of his arm inches from his neck. People think Lup is the merciful one from the IPRE mission, but they always seem to forget she is the most wrathful one as well.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What are you going to do with me?” He wavers but sets his jaw beneath the blade.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re going to dead people prison,” Barry tells him with a completely straight face.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kravitz drags a hand down his face like he’s fooling any of them when she can see the grin behind his palm. “Please,” he starts, “be professional. It’s called The Eternal Stockade.” A considering pause. “But yes, dead people prison, essentially.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Barry gives the guy a once-over and frowns. “God, you couldn’t just settle for being necromancers, or heretical death-defiers, could you?” Alright, she could see Kravitz bite his lip at that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Honey, hypocrisy,” Lup interjects. “Just a bit of that, like, right now.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“We’ve got extenuating circumstances, babe.” He continues and the most senior reaper walks over to the group of huddled children, all of whom had stayed oddly still this entire time. “You guys weren’t just necromancers, you were </span>
  <em>
    <span>bad</span>
  </em>
  <span> Necromancers. Hey, come over here, look at this ritual circle!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup glances at the ring on the floor, crusted with chipped blood.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Look at this, is this yours? You completely forgot to take into consideration the weight of the souls, holy cow, the Osiris Effect is base level Necromancy.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup grins and bends over the circle, pointing to a small sigil swooping around its edge. “I think you forgot to carry a ‘one’ here,” She suggests, and then looks at all the added elements warping the intended effect of the circle. “No, you definitely forgot to carry a ‘one.’”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The halfling stays still on the floor, eyes flickering between the two of them. “Are you— are you guys going to kill me anytime soon?” he asks wearily. “Or are you going to keep acting like my mom after I dropped my Law major?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Just out of curiosity, what were you even trying to do with this? I honestly can’t tell from this circle.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Today is an auspicious occasion,” he begins, voice growing impassioned. “We, the servants of Jeffandrew—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh gods, please no.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Weren’t you there for the whole ‘he wants to be left alone’ end of that bit?” Barry admonishes and then sends him to the Astral Plane. “I can deal with practitioners, morally abhorrent and all, but for some reason, it’s the ones incompetent at the craft that get me.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There’s a shuffling from the corner of the room, small kids getting slowly to their feet, and to hell with Kravitz’s professionalism, she’s not about to face a bunch of traumatized kids without skin on her face and Lup switches to her more sinewy form. A thought occurs to her at that and Lup says to Barry out of the corner of her mouth, “Did we just slaughter a bunch of dudes in front of the teeny-tinies?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I told them I cast a black shield around them and then used Blindness and Deafness,” he mutters back sagely, and Lup exhales.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The hoard of children look around the room warily, bodies crumpled to the floor, and Lup resists the urge to find a closet to shove them in like a guilty teenager. Most of them are young, still in their single digits, and their eyes are tired. All of them wary and scared. Lup points to her face and makes eyes at Barry who quickly switches back to having a nose again, muscle stretching over the bone of his skull.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“These are my coworkers, Barry and Lup,” Kravitz introduces, a Dwarf boy on his hip, nose red and sniffling. “They’re going to help me get you all home.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A small Human boy in the back tugs on the sleeve of a girl next to him, eyes puffy with tears, sleeves soaked and stained. “Did you hear him, Prilla? He said that’s Lup.” The girl with ram horns looks up, and then runs to her side, tugging at her robe with her still-damp sleeves.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, hello there,” Lup bends down. “What’s your name?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“‘M, Prilla,” she starts. “Are you </span>
  <em>
    <span>Lup</span>
  </em>
  <span>?” Prilla says her name with more gravity than Lup thinks a child under four feet should be able to give.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hell, yeah, that’s me.” At her agreement, almost like permission had been given, the rest of the kids swarm forward, five or so staying shy around Kravitz. A boy looks up at Barry with a gaping mouth and Lup has ten or so all scrambling around her, yelling over each other, voices high and eager unlike the sullen crowd of just a few seconds before.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re </span>
  <em>
    <span>Lup</span>
  </em>
  <span>, wow—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“My mama says you saved our home, and I saw your really cool adventure in my head!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Me too!” </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She laughs and bends down, high-fiving the one or two holding their hands out expectantly, and there are universes in their little gazes, bigger, she could almost say, then the kind the Hunger ate. “I’m pretty cool, but don’t you guys want to go home now? I don’t know about all you, but it smells absolutely wretched in here and I’m ready to not stink like garbage.” Slowly, they start shepherding them out of the hallway, Lup lighting the way with a simple Conjure Flame as the younger ones are led out, hands gripping the shirt in front of them and the kid at the front holding onto Kravitz’s long robe. Prilla holds her hand while they walk, and Lup isn’t about to make her let go anytime soon, so she crouches a little while walking.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re really pretty,” the girl mutters, and then even quieter, something muffled she doesn’t quite manage to make out.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup gives her gentlest smile and cups her ear. “Didn’t make that one out, kiddo, mind saying it again?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Prilla flushes and with red-hot cheeks tells her, “You’re my hero. Thank you for saving the world.” And then she lets go of Lup’s hand for a second to bury her face in her cupped palms as they walk, shoulders still shivering from the damp air, mold and a sulfurous stench wafting as they walk.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re welcome,” Lup replies softly, and then, “and thank you too,” without explaining why. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>They keep walking, toward the literal light at the end of the tunnel, figures in the dark, and Prilla slips her hand back into Lup’s, tiny fingers reddened at the tips and so cold. Fragile, in her much larger hand, and so very breakable. Breakable, like trust and bonds, shared memories, pedestals, and the weight of a little girl’s belief, heavier than any expectation Lup has carried before because the end of the world did not have the same faith in her this child did. Her breath catches in her throat and she steadies herself, inhaling slowly to keep it even. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’ve been pretty brave,” Lup smiles, responsibility settling in like fingers on a goldfish’s tank, heart swimming around panicked. “Looks like you’ve had a rough time of it too.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I cried earlier,” Prilla admits quietly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I don’t think that makes you any less of a little hero yourself, my dude,” It’s a whisper in her mouth, like a secret, and the tiefling girl leans in because children thrive on secrets and conjured monsters, adventures where they win and come out the other side unharmed. Lup knows she did. “Crying’s what the really cool heroes do because they’re not ashamed of themselves.” Prilla blinks at her. “Crying is good for you. Better for you than fighting monsters at least.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh.” She returns, and then thinly, just above the lapping of the sewer, a sniffle. Her palm is almost warm in Lup’s fingers, and she grips her fingers tightly. “Can I show you something?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“For sure. Let’s see it, small child. What is it, a cool rock? ‘Cause I live for those bad boys,” Lup encourages, and Prilla extends the hand not in Lup’s, tiny digits curled into a fist in front of her, and uncurls her palm. Sparks fly out, bursting from her lifeline, lighting the ceiling as tiny fireflies flit through the caverns below the city and light up the faces of awed children around them who gasp and point, the gnomish boy holding Kravitz’s cloak giggling at the front of the line.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They sink to the ground, wilting, the aftermath of a firework. “I liked your fire, so—” she shrugs. “Mama taught me Pretzel-digi-nation.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s super cool, you learned that?” Her hand is dwarfed by her own fingers, but Prilla’s face lights up with retrained glee when she casts, and Lup feels in awe of her, her unbridled happiness. “How old are you again?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>She smiles sheepishly and holds up four fingers, and it hits her. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup stares, and her heart picks up because next year, she is going to be able to put up a fifth finger, and her horns will grow longer and she will learn more spells, something to do with fire maybe, and she will have the chance to let her smile grow bold and let her teeth all fall out and grown back in because this world has a future. This child has a future that doesn’t end in death too big for a body that was already too small to hold herself.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Faerun will see the next sunrise, and then the one after that, and it is in part because of her. This world is going to survive, and not only that, it is going to thrive.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are you okay?” Prilla pipes up. “You’re crying.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup swipes across her face and snorts something ugly, bubbling and hot in her stomach and climbing up her neck. “Didn’t I say heroes do that sometimes?” Her hand is squeezed gently and she feels careful pats against the small of her back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They come out the other side of the grated entrance, and she opens a portal to the parents she visited, pulling them through for more than a few teary reunions, smoothed aprons, forehead kisses. Prilla waves bye, lifting her head from her mom’s shoulder to wiggle little fingers at her before the crease in reality splits shut behind her. Barry sighs once they’re all gone.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, babe?” He asks. “I want so many. Like, so so many.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup huffs in laughter, and then stops for a moment, considering because children weren’t a thing she’d ever really had the time to think about, not on the mission, not in the umbrella, but the concept isn’t terrible. “You know what? Same, kinda. We’d have to figure some stuff out, get our shit together a little but. Maybe.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I still have that growth pod, and if I can regrow a whole adult body from that—” Barry announces in front of their boss, and his eyebrows fly up, eyes creasing with his smile, and speech picking up as he works himself up about the idea. “There’s absolutely no reason to think we wouldn’t be able to modify it to create a baby. Maybe stop the process partway through, before it reaches full adult—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Baby steps, Barry.” Lup interrupts, pulling him out of his spiraling thoughts, the glint in his pupils, and he flushes, pink climbing to his ears in a way that makes his eyes seem brighter. Beautiful and so so kissable. “That sounds like a super duper great idea to think about later when we don’t need to bust ass to Lucas’s School for Magic Prodigies like Angus.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I’d best be on my way then,” Kravitz nods, opening a rift to her brother’s place undoubtedly. “I’ll see you there. Are we still on for supper at yours after?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Made that blueberry cheesecake just for you, Krav,” She replies, and he gives a tightly controlled fist pump as he passes through.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>“Today is a special day, for all of us here,” Angus says, standing tall on a stool at the podium in front of the stadium. “Except the one-year-olds, I guess, but I want to tell you why today is special to me. We are resilient, all of us, unwilling to give up on this world and the people in it, and when it mattered the most, we worked together. In harmony, you could say.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Barry snickers next to her, and Taako groans a few seats over. Lup runs her hands over her jeans, rubbing the fibers, and she is light, happy. Proud too, but that can wait until later when she can congratulate the boy detective, robes still a little long despite the tailoring. The Valedictorian sash around his neck hangs past his knees, fluttering.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“And that’s why today is so special. It’s for the same reason yesterday was an incredible occasion, and the same reason tomorrow will be too,” His voice rings out, sweeping over the audience. “Today is an incredible thing because today exists and we fought to make sure it would. The fact that I even have the chance to learn all these wonderful magics is like a dream come true, but it is better than that because it is a dream I earned. A dream we all earned.” Angus pauses, and from her seat, Lup feels like he is looking every single one of them in the eye, determination radiant from the set of his stance. “I would like to thank Mr. Taako for teaching me magic, Mr. Lucas Miller for this school, and I would like to thank all of you for being alive with me. I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings!” He pulls off his cap, holding it high above his head like a victory, a fist held above Magnus’s shoulders exactly a year ago with scratches across his face, tired but joyous. That image of him superimposes this Angus, and then he throws his cap into the sky, a small group of graduates tossing theirs up too, and they flutter harmlessly to the ground, blue cloth instead of smoke black pillars.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The crowd converges around the new graduates, and she sees Taako elbowing his way to the front of the crowd, Kravitz’s hand in his own. Merle isn’t there, having promised to meet up with them with his kids for the celebration after. Lup starts to make her way down the stairs too, stepping out onto the large slate steps and sees someone lagging behind the crowd, staring out with a quiet grin, relentlessly proud in her navy blazer and white chiffon blouse.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Barry looks back at her expectantly as he takes a few steps down the rows of seats. Lup waves him ahead and he eyes Lucretia and her before nodding and departing to the stage where Angus is hastily greeting the crowd, teeth glinting and face open with a raw happiness.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hey, Luce,” Lup falls into step with her, and Lucretia twitches when she comes up. “How’ve you been? Not hiding up on that big ol’ rock in the sky, are you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Not so much,” Lucretia replies, and the first time Lup saw her, she jolted because somehow, in her mind, her friends had become eternal, fixed and unchanging and to see them so thoroughly different was weird beyond words. But, her quick eyes, lit with flint and sharp as any blade, her wit and the slight exhale she gave at seeing Lup— those were the same. “Rebuilding for the most part, which has turned out to be a very long process. How have you been adjusting?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh you know, this and that, adjusting to the new job, saving children from cults in between rescuing kittens from trees,” She dismisses airily. “Not much.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Me either.” Lup bites her lip, and the corners of Lucretia’s mouth twitch up like they did when she pulled a goof and proceeded to be last suspect on the list, like she did when they were family, living together and close enough Lup could say she knew each of them like the back of her hand. Lucretia laughs, that warm embrace of air, sweet as birdsong from behind her teeth. “You would not believe the wild shit I have seen in the past year. Some people have literally gotten down on their knees and prostrated themselves before me in front of an entire crew of architects designing the new Neverwinter City Hall.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup snorts at the image. “I’m sure you got enough worship at the old bureau as it was. I had a little girl tell me I was her hero this morning, and I swear to god I almost burst straight into fucking tears right then and there.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, so it’s perfect for you then,” Lucretia teases, raising a knowing eyebrow and Lup doesn’t stop the smug look that wants to spread itself over her face. “Name in the throats of your victims instead of up in the lights."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“That’s how I prefer it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Taako’s voice squawks, loud and filled with bravado from Angus’s side, Lucas Miller a few feet away with an irritated look. Something about lessons and magic and first times. Lup watches with fondness curling, purring like a cat in a ray of sunshine, satisfied as her brother points an admonishing finger at the Dean and Magnus swings Angus onto his shoulders, the tiny valedictorian’s robe wrinkling over his back.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup turns to poke fun at Lucetria, something about motherly pride and being too old and too young at the same time to be a mother, but her hands are curled tightly in each other, knuckles white at her side and brow furrowed with a crease. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Lup…” She begins hesitantly, “are you sure you want me there tonight? I know things are still awkward between me and Taako. I—” Lucretia tells her, voice pained, there is nothing she wants less, “I wouldn’t want to bring down the mood.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Hmm. Nope, you’re coming alright.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The director blinks, and continues, “You’re not even going to consider—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Nope.” She pops the ‘P’ irreverently.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lucretia sucks in a put-upon breath and forges onward. “Look, Angus deserves to have the best celebration we can give him, and I don’t want to ruin that with something simple as my presence.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Little guy worked hard for this,” Lup counters, ignoring the latter half of that sentence. “Don’t you think he’ll want you there to celebrate with him? He’s going to want you there, and if Taako has anything to say about it, he’s gonna have to ask the little man. Not me. It’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>his</span>
  </em>
  <span> party, after all.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Her eyes shine, and there’s a warble in her voice, but Lucretia’s face splits into a wide grin as they look at Taako, reaching up on his tiptoes to place his wide-brimmed wizard hat on Angus’s head, where the tip flops forward a bit. “I think Taako would give him anything he asks for right now,” she confesses.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Oh, that boy could ask for the moon and he would be throwing hands like </span>
  <em>
    <span>that</span>
  </em>
  <span>,” Lup agrees. “Don’t tell him or he won’t say Angus’s actual name again for a year.” Her cheeks hurt from smiling so much, and it is so good to be back, to have her family, even if it is messy, and as Lucretia's gaze turns wistful over the sea of people, and she can estimate pretty well what thoughts are running in her mind. “You know he loves you, right?” Lup tells her suddenly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lucretia startles when she does. “What? I— I don’t…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He’s angry and furious. I mean, don’t get me wrong,” Lup hurries to the next part at the pained look Lucretia shoots her. “But that’s part of the reason why he’s so mad. He loves you, but right now he’s so caught up in what you did to him that he can’t separate the two and that makes him angrier. The fact that he loves you, still.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It doesn’t change anything,” Lucretia replies, not looking at her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I… Lucretia, what Taako decides isn’t up to me,” Lup tells her. “That’s on him. Everything’s all caught up in his head, tangled together, but you’ve done everything you can. Just—” She grasps for words, “I wonder if you’ve considered forgiving yourself yet.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lucretia stares at her, eyes wide and uncomprehending. “Forgive myself?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“If you want to move on, that’s something you gotta rely on yourself for,” Lup tells her, thinking of guilt and burnt greenhouses. “Taako’s forgiveness isn’t— look. Forgiveness has to start with you.” She fumbles with her words a little clumsily.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Is it even my right?” Lucretia says, lowering her gaze. “Why should I get to decide whether or not my actions can be forgiven?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup chides, “It’s not about what’s unforgivable, Luce. It’s about learning to accept you’ve made mistakes and then putting them behind you.” She leans into her side as they pause on the steps, knocking their shoulders together. “And it’s not impossible either. If it makes you feel any better, I forgave you, and Lucretia you’re one of the best people in the world. I love you so much, you know that right?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I love you too,” Lucretia tells her, voice breaking. “I’m grateful I met you every single day.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>God, they haven’t even said hello to Angus yet, and Lup has cried once already today. “Aww, babe,” Lup replies and there isn’t a crack in her voice at all, “that’s so sweet. Please shut up before the others see you making me cry.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They linger at the edges of the crowd which has slowly started to wane, drifting away into their own homes to celebrate. Lucretia and Lup stand along their edges, one of the many. It’s wonderful, to be part of a crowd instead of an arm’s length away, mentally and physically present as everyone else there. She loses track of Lucretia as she cuts a path toward Barry who’s handing Angus a thick leather book with a tarnished clasp, ancient with its pages crumpled.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Remember,” he instructs, plopping the thing into the detective’s open fingers, “no matter what anyone tells you, the main rules of Necromancy are Safe, Sane, and Consensual—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Barry!” Lup calls out, as Magnus laughs, looking delighted by this turn of events while Taako gives her husband a look that could melt steel. “Where’d you get that thing, I brought Angus’s present in my bag.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Found it with the cultists, they had some pretty alright beginner spell books,” Barry explains.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Angus looks at the thick book with wide eyes. “Necromancy? This could be really helpful with my work as a part-time detective if I can determine the cause of the death using the undead arts. Thank you so much, sir!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Transmutation is a way better specialty than playing with corpses,” Taako interjects, grabbing at the book Angus tucks away under his robes with quick fingers. “You two are corrupting the fuck out of him and he only just hit double digits.” He declares, after failing to cajole Magnus into doing something with his elbow.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Don’t know how you managed to graduate so early, Angus,” Magnus tells him, reaching over to ruffle his hair through Taako’s hat, “Given how you’re not even tall enough to see above the desks.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Angus bats at Magnus's hands with one of his own, book still safely tucked beneath his arm. “Sir,” he protests, “sir, please, I spent a lot of time making sure I look presentable and we still have to head to Miss Lup’s place for some crazy wild partying.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Lost cause from the beginning, my man.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Are— are you saying I’m ugly? That’s kind of rude, especially seeing as I just graduated—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Top of your class,” Lup interrupts, “you absolute mad lad. Consider Barry’s gift a… bonus for rocking Miller’s school shit.” She pulls out her own package, bulky and square, messily wrapped because she’s shit at it and because it’s been in her bag for a couple of hours at this point which does its already poor job no favours. “I know you already got a book, but…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s no problem at all,” Angus takes it eagerly, after a second of caution Lup isn’t sure she deserves, “I’ve been wanting to read something Evocation-based to round myself out more.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Sort of a killjoy when you take the surprise out of gift-giving like that,” Taako mentions, leaning over his shoulder, “And really, Lulu? Tempting him away with more of your inferior specialties?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“O-oh, I’m sorry, Miss Lup, I can do it again and pretend to be surprised this time.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup raises a finger to her chin and goes, “No, no, it’s fine, little dude. I was just wondering who my brother thinks he is, talking trash without a gift of his own.” She hisses exaggeratedly, wincing back, “Little rude don’t you think, sort of inconsiderate I would say, even.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Got you beat in one on that account too,” Taako pats Angus’s head. “It’s your lucky day, Ango, you get to keep this rocking hat, which is probably worth a lot, so this really is a sacrifice on my part, giving it away to you free and all.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Angus clutches the brim of the hat, mouth open, and then he makes a high pitched sort of squeaky noise she’s never heard from him before. “I can keep this? Like— like a real wizard’s hat, you’re giving it to me?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Uh, yeah—” and Taako grunts in the middle of his sentence as the full force of a ten-year-old boy slams into his waist, wrapping his arms around him in what looks like a rib-crushing hug. “Woah, you don’t have to make it a whole thing.” Angus says something against his cardigan she doesn’t hear, and Taako gives a smile, the kind he used to save just for the seven of them, and says, “Yeah, okay. You’re welcome, Angus.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Barry wraps an arm through hers, and she remembers something lumpy in her back pocket as he brushes up against it. “I don’t think we’re gonna be able to beat that,” he laughs, but Lup is too busy pulling out her camera before they pull apart.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Say ‘Lup is the best wizard I will ever have the pleasure of meeting,’” She announces.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Absolutely not,” Taako says shrilly, and Angus repeats it back dutifully.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Golden lab! Or, Saint Bernard’s, wait no, uhh Mastiffs? Puppers,” Magnus informs the wide lens as Barry wraps his arms around her shoulder, and the camera shutter comes down.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Click.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>Chatter fills the halls of Lup’s home, warm, familiar, and something in her sighs at it, the easy weight of conversation throughout the house. She’s experienced both extremes, conversation in the corners of every room, first thing in the morning as she rubs her eyes, and silence suffocating in an infinite expanse because the place she was in had no walls.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Have you seen Taako around at all?” Kravitz asks as she sets aside a bowl of salad in order to start taking out the plates. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I think he was on the porch a bit ago showing off for the kids,” She considers. “You need to talk to him right now?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, no I just thought it might be a bit more comfortable if I was introduced to your guests by someone they knew,” He tucks a tightly woven lock of hair behind his ear. “Not sure I still know how to do it myself.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I mean, you seem like a pretty chill dude to Barry and me, so you can’t be doing too bad of a job.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He smiles crookedly in a way that makes her stop, while it’s still hanging, stooped like an apple from a lowered branch, wondering why Taako chose domesticity for once in his life. “Thanks, I guess.” Kravitz sort of stands there for a moment, with the awkward lumber of someone who doesn’t know what to do with themselves. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Overwhelmed?” Lup pries, “Because we’ve got a bedroom upstairs if you want to hide out for a bit and I can totally cover for you. ‘Oh yeah, he had a super important reaper thing to do, very badass, very classified.’”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“It’s not quite that,” he says, and looks at the dining room, Killian sat beside Lucretia whose poker face breaks every five seconds, Merle talking to Magnus in the next room over, Taako coming in through the front door, Mavis holding Mookie’s hand as they follow him in. “You know, for a really long time I never had anything like this,” Kravitz whispers, soft, and the light of the kitchen casts a glow on his face, stripping him of any coldness in its warm yellow haze. “And I know I must have at some point, but it feels new to me. Like I’m living again, but for the first time. Nothing has changed physically for me at the very least, but I look around and…”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You’re not an outsider anymore,” Lup finishes. “I think I can get that, Bone Boy.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then, he’s facing her, uncomprehending before he leans back against the counter and goes, “Huh. You would, wouldn’t you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Kravitz conducts himself with a type of poise that has been forgotten for centuries, rewritten with fresh ink over a creased and faded page, and it shows. He’s intimidating, a force of nature. People cower before him because for all intents and purposes he is a force of nature— more, even. He carries out the natural will of the universe. So does she, Lup supposes, but she hasn’t quite gotten the quivering fear from her victims just yet, and besides, she’s seen unstoppable wrath, and that isn’t Kravitz.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Was it the hundred years spent an arm’s length from society,” She starts, flippant and teasing, “or the decade in the umbrella that did it for you?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Both. Either,” Kravitz replies. “Sorry, I’m saying this all wrong, but um, It’s nice to know someone gets it.” He cups the back of his neck and she nods at Taako to put him out of his misery and because she needs to start moving some of the tableware to the dining room and he’s blocking the cupboard with all their glasses.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup waves a hand at her brother. “Think I found you your wizard, Krav. Dinner will be out in a second if you want to find a good seat.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Yes, thank you,” he tells her, leaning up from the counter. “And I wanted to say, just in case no one’s told you yet— welcome back to society, Lup. To people.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They lock eyes for a moment and there is a kind of bond in that too. Lup blinks, and it disappears. She throws back, “Get your butt to the kitchen and we can toast to that later, though I might add a subclause or something.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“‘All hail the reaper’ I presume?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“More like, ‘let’s decide to never destroy the known and unknown universe by turning into a Fantasy Inter-Planar Pac-Man,’” Lup returns and he laughs as walks over to her brother, shoulders shaking. “But sure.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup is more used to having someone at her side when she cooks than not, but right now, her family couldn’t be closer and they don’t need to be within three feet of her for her to feel it. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She pulls out her wand, loose in her grip and mostly used for basic spells like the Levitation these days, like she’s about to cast on the salad and plates. It feels oddly nice to go back to the basics, to not have a threat thundering at her heels as she hunches over books and notes from the late night to the early morning and still comes up short. It’s been a while, Lup thinks, since she loved magic, and now it’s something she can let herself have and it is beautiful. Something special again, wondrous the way it’s always meant to be, like back when she was in her first hundred years of life, casting sparks as she slept and waking up to singed sheets.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Twelve cups, twelve circles gleaming along their rims, twelve planes and Lups staring back at her from glass walls. She looks happy.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You don’t want any help with those?” Lup startles forward as she realizes Carey Fangbattle is standing at her side, already reaching to pick up one of the glasses without her answer.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Uh,” She starts, “I’m okay, but if you want to get a seat of your choosing, you’re gonna have to grab it before people start claiming their own. We don’t do reservations here at the Bluejean’s, unfortunately, and now that I’m saying it out loud, we’re still coming to a consensus on the name.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Carey doesn’t put down the cup, and snorts. “Wow, uh, we haven’t talked much but I can really see the resemblance between you guys.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Me and Taako—” she’s about to say something about being identical and then remembers it isn’t true anymore, but Carey doesn’t seem to notice her lapse.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Right, yeah, you and Taako, sure,” She dismisses. “Nah, I was talking about you and Magnus. He didn’t know how to say ‘yes’ to a pair of willing hands either. Now, what was that about these glasses?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You know,” Lup says slowly, biting her lip so she doesn’t smile, “there sure are a lot of glasses and I would hate to spend the rest of the party cleaning them up if I broke them with Levitate.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“There we are,” and she grabs about half of them, picking them up by the rims, and brings them to the table. Lup slides the roast out of the oven and laughs to herself in the kitchen because she was just compared to Magnus Burnsides, the guy that started their mission with a black eye worn like a rite of passage.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There are plates, ornate and detailed laid out around the table, roast and salad, three different types of gravy because she insisted, and there is her family. Angus, sitting at the head of the table because it’s his party, Magnus next to Merle beside his kids, an open spot beside Barry for herself, Lucretia, and between her and Angus sits Taako. She wonders if he’s sitting there because of Angus and it was the only option left. She wonders if he’s using that as an excuse and then stops when she sees Kravitz grinning knowingly at him from Angus’s other side. It’s everyone, save Davenport who’s treading on water instead of solid ground she’s sure. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>“What do you think you’re going to do next, Angus?” Lucretia’s voice, clearly enunciating and precise.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“I was thinking of doing some detective work before accepting Lucas’s offer to come back to the university as a professor, go back to my roots and all that—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“He offered you what? Agnes, you know I have a school—”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Mookie, be careful with the gravy, you almost dipped your sleeve into it!”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They murmur over each other, quiet and warm, Carey and Killian along the left side, the orc woman handing her wife a forked yam, Magnus sweeping half the roast onto his plate, and still leaving more than enough for everyone else because Lup isn’t an </span>
  <em>
    <span>amateur</span>
  </em>
  <span>, thank you very much. Lucretia reaches across the table for the plate of Yorkshire puddings, breaded muffins, and without looking at her, Taako grabs it and passes it to her without pause. There’s a briefly startled look on her face before something in it relaxes and she takes one without fuss.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“Dibs on dish duty,” Barry turns to her, chewing on a piece of pan-fried broccoli.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“First, dessert,” Lup plans, “and if we don’t burn down the house by then, we’ll worry about dishes.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It was easy to forget, especially with a concept as big as ‘the apocalypse’ that there is life beyond it as it became entangled with the end of all things. That’s what the apocalypse was supposed to be. The end of all things, and yet Lup kept living. She kept living and stopped recognizing herself, and felt guilty about living like it was her responsibility to, but she’s here and it turns out life goes on past the end of the world. Lup goes on past the end of the world.</span>
</p><p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>
  <span>The best part of getting a house? Having a bed bigger than a twin size and being able to comfortably fit into it with Barry. She slips on her pajamas and climbs into bed with him, taking his hand beneath the cover and twining her fingers between his.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“So, how was your day today?” He asks, all fake suave charm like they’re meeting for the first time in a darkly lit bar, but his voice shakes on the first syllable and then the mattress is shivering beneath them at their chuckles.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“You were there for all of it, Barry,” she replies, comfortable beneath the sheets, and unminding of how small she feels with her toes curled up against them. “You really wanna rerun of your own day?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“No, I want to hear about your day, from you,” he insists. “I don’t know what it was like for you, I’m not a mind reader, thank god.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>“‘Thank god?’” Lup asks.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>His eyes are so bright even in the dark of their room, lights turned off, face bare without his glasses. “Well, I’d miss out on getting to hear you tell me what you’re thinking.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The house is quiet, even with Taako and Kravitz in one of the guest rooms, Angus, Lucretia, Magnus, enough people that she gets to wake up to the sound of living in the morning. She thinks, wake up, because tonight seems restful, legs slipped between the sheets, her lover’s legs. Are Barry’s dreams shot through with neon lightning, she wonders. There’s no such thing as too many nightmares, and Lup wakes up sometimes with Barry still clutching her hand, arm wrapped around his like he can’t bear to let go. Her’s are more of the endless drowning variety, the space between breaths, an exhale and nothing too. Old fears and new fears, the both of them.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now, when she wakes up in the middle of the night, slipping from bed, it’s to an empty house and cold floors, and there is never anyone curled up on the front porch. But, her days are filled with an azure sky, a market full of people she belongs to, and Lup still has her family plus a few extra she is coming to cherish. She gets to have all of it, and Lup clings to it selfishly, unrepentantly because love is a thing she gets to have now and she refuses to give it up, even for herself who sometimes slopes with guilt when her head says she isn’t deserving. She lets it pass, and then asks Barry whose answer is always the same. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Do I deserve this</span>
  </em>
  <span>? Quieter. </span>
  <em>
    <span>Do I deserve you</span>
  </em>
  <span>? Of course, of course, of course, like there was never any doubt at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Lup replies to Barry. “I— I had a pretty kickass day, actually. Kind of looking forward to tomorrow now that I think about it.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He smiles, something private and precious, a gift in the soft dark of their room, their house, a home. “Me too.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>So, she closes her eyes against a dark that cannot stand all the light in her chest, and Lup sighs, wind from a sail, a ship docked at port. The world will still be there tomorrow.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Editing this like... asfjhdk (how the f u c k do you write fight scenes)<br/>Could have left the first chap as it was but I needed them to have the happy ending, partly for myself.</p><p>Come find me @themagicmistress on Tumblr!</p>
        </blockquote><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Lup is one of the most beloved characters I have ever come across, for very good reason, and I hope I have done her even a modicum of justice with this piece.</p><p>You can come find me @themagicmistress on Tumblr.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>